Working Together – UCS Management and VMware vRealize Operations

Guest Blogger: Nithya Natesan, Technical Marketing Engineer

Coopetition really does create great results. That’s what Cisco and VMware realized many years ago when we started working together. We compete and we continue to cooperate on projects like the Cisco UCS Management Pack for VMware vRealize Operations. The latest version of the management pack, version 2.0(1), was recently released after a lengthy beta, and it supports vRealize Operations (vROps) version 6.0 and 6.1.

Significant Functionality in a Single Pack

The VMware and Cisco development teams have worked closely together to enhance the functionality in this release of the management pack. This plug-in provides correlation between the Cisco UCS servers, storage and networking as well as Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure physical resources and the VMWare virtual infrastructure components. It features several capabilities including UCS inventory, monitoring of health and alerts, viewing correlations and I/O power, temperature and performance metrics from within vRealize Operations.

There are multiple dashboards that help you visualize your environment, including the mapping of physical infrastructure to virtual infrastructure resources. Health and performance monitoring are provided for network traffic, faults, temperature and many other metrics.

I wanted to highlight some of the capabilities for users, so I developed a new demo video that summarizes some of the many functions in the latest version of the Cisco UCS Management Pack for VMware vRealize. Click here to watch the video.

Customers provided us with input, and we’ve implemented better arrangement of stats counters for network management and added support for new metrics:

Error counters for DCE interfaces, fabric port and port channels

Exhaust temperature for chassis fan modules

This new release is another example of how Cisco and VMware continue to cooperate and work together to enhance our solutions. I think you’ll find there are some real improvements to make your daily operational activities easier, and there’s more to come as we continue to enhance the management pack.

You can go to the Cisco Communities site to download the Management Pack. There’s also a User Guide and release note on the page.

Nithya