Cisco Intersight – Automating Standalone Rack Servers

Customers want the ability to automate the configuration and deployment of rack-mount servers without the need for fabric interconnects. Intersight Essentials provides policy-based configuration management for Cisco UCS standalone C-Series servers.

Guest Blogger: Greg Wilkinson, Technical Marketing Engineer

Applying Policy-Driven Automation to Standalone Servers

Using Cisco Intersight, administrators can now apply the same policy-based approach that they are accustomed to with UCS Manager when they deploy standalone Cisco C-Series rack servers. Once the servers are racked and stacked, they can be configured and managed from anywhere using Cisco Intersight Essentials. This enables the one to many style of update and management of server policies using server profiles through a cloud-based platform. Cisco Intersight Essentials includes polices for BIOS settings, precision boot order, SNMP, NTP, and a variety of other configurable options. Users can also perform bulk firmware updates of these rack-mount servers quickly and easily.

Administrators can then assign a set of policies to a server profile that can be deployed on an endpoint. The profile can be modified and re-deployed as needed, and also cloned to push to multiple servers.

The video below outlines how to create a set of policies in Cisco Intersight, and then assign/deploy a server profile using these policies.

Cisco Intersight works in conjunction with the Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC) to configure the following attributes of the server using a policy-based framework: BIOS, precision boot-order, Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) over LAN, Serial interface over LAN, and others. Additional policies will be added to Intersight in the near future.

Efficient Cloud-Based Systems Management

The goal of Cisco Intersight is to eliminate repetitive tasks associated with configuring and maintaining systems as we move management to the cloud. In a recent blog we described how Intersight Essentials can automate firmware updates. This policy-based automation is another way Cisco Intersight simplifies and streamlines configuring servers and storage.

You can try Intersight Essentials today for free with our free 90-day trial offer. Just access the Intersight portal at Intersight.com using your Cisco ID.

Learn more by going to cisco.com/go/intersight