To highlight the power and ease of use of the UCS PowerTool SDK and XML, a Windows PowerShell scripting contest was run from March 27th to May 11th. Championed by Technical Marketing Engineers Eric Williams and Jeff Foster, the contest exceeded its goals with 24 scripts submitted.
The most popular category was configuring a new UCS domain from scratch with five different entries. Most notable was Cisco Customer Solutions Architect Chris Carter who had never written a script before. In his words:
“I have never written a script using any method prior to this one, and because of the power of the ConvertTo-UCS cmdlet, I was able to write the entire script in about a week.
For me, this was the real power of the tool… an amateur like me, having zero experience, writing a script that fully configured an environment from scratch, following all best practices developed jointly by Cisco and Citrix.”
The true power of the tool was shown by scripts that integrated with UCS Central, NetApp storage, Microsoft SQL, and LDAP.
So who were the winners? Joshua Barton was the grand prize winner for his UCS Backup script and was also an intermediate prize winner. The other intermediate prize winners were Alberto Yanes and Matt Oswalt (check out his Keeping it Classless blog!).
We again want to thank the judges who helped with the contest: Jeffrey Snover, Rob Willis, Don Jones, Thomas Maurer, and Hal Rottenberg (shown below on stage with me at the Cisco Live awards ceremony).
Go check out all the great scripts on the Cisco Community.
Call to Action! Share these scripts and submit new scripts on the Community.
Fantastic results! Congratulations to Joshua and all of the participants. It’s great to see everyone sharing innovative ideas on how to take advantage of what UCS offers. This is what makes the community such a strong resource.
Thanks again to our judges!