Cisco UCS Central Overview

A Cisco UCS Manager can control, manage, configure, and monitor the servers that belong to a single Cisco UCS domain, which means that these are the servers connected to the pair of Fabric Interconnects that run the instance of the Cisco UCSM. If you have other UCS domains, you have to take care and perform the needed configuration on each Cisco UCS Manager separately. It is true that you can export and import configurations between the Cisco UCS Managers, but this is a manual process that’s prone to errors. To solve this challenge and to provide a single pane of glass for all of your UCS domains, Cisco has developed Cisco UCS Central. It can extend the capabilities and concepts of Cisco UCS Manager to enable the streamlined management of up to 10,000 servers across hundreds of sites from a single user interface. It is an HTML5 application that can manage multiple Cisco UCS Manager applications (see Figure 17-36).

Figure 17-36 Cisco UCS Central

Here are some of the capabilities at a global level:

Centralized inventory and health status information for all Cisco UCS components for a definitive view of the entire infrastructure
An API-based integration into higher-level data center management frameworks
Global service profiles and templates that extend the power of policy-based management introduced in Cisco UCS Manager well beyond the boundary of a single Cisco UCS domain
A centralized keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM) manager to launch KVM sessions anywhere in the Cisco UCS environment from a single pane
Centralized, policy-based firmware upgrades that can be applied globally or selectively through automated schedules or as business workloads demand
Global administrative policies that enable both global and local management of Cisco UCS domains, help ensure consistency and standardization across domains, and eliminate any configuration drift typically experienced after servers are initially deployed
Hardware compatibility reports that retrieve the latest compatibility information from Cisco.com and compare that to your managed configuration to help ensure that current or future firmware is compatible with deployed operating system and driver versions
Global ID pooling and multidomain ID visibility to eliminate identifier conflicts