Automating Your Data Center With HyperFlex and UCS Director

Cisco has made deployment, provisioning and expansion of data center workloads running on Cisco HyperFlex and Cisco UCS up to 90% faster and much easier by delivering private Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) with UCS Director.

Guest Blogger: Gil Haberman

Cisco UCS Director provides automation for the majority of the converged infrastructure installed worldwide. It orchestrates workflows across compute, storage and network resources to implement routine tasks quickly and consistently. This automation has been extended to Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure in the latest release of UCS Director. It facilitates a new era of hyperconvergence that supports a broader range of infrastructure. You can now realize greater efficiencies for continuous delivery using the foundation of Cisco UCS for both converged infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure, eliminating data center silos and streamlining operations across your environment.

Enabling Continuous Delivery

Cisco HyperFlex is engineered on Cisco UCS to provide programmable infrastructure. The unified API and software object model in the Cisco UCS management framework work in conjunction with the Cisco® fabric interconnects and the Virtual Interface Cards (VICs) to facilitate infrastructure as code. The Service Profiles in Cisco UCS management provision the infrastructure and facilitate infrastructure lifecycle management for Cisco HyperFlex and the I/O properties within a Cisco UCS domain. For example, the UCS Director workflow automates the provisioning of virtual machines (VMs) using HyperFlex native cloning capabilities.

Unified Automation in Action

We created this video to explain how you can use Cisco HyperFlex together with the converged infrastructure solutions developed with our partners- VCE vBlock and NetApp FlexPod. This demo shows how UCS Director fully automates many manual and error-prone steps in to rapidly deploy workloads. (Click on the arrow to start the video).

https://youtu.be/NdqgJkQnXxA

IaaS Without the Cloud

The Cisco HyperFlex solution with UCS Director delivers true Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS). The Virtual Data Center (VDC) Creation Wizard automatically discovers a newly installed HyperFlex System. It creates VDC resources by assigning policies for a group of users and management of multiple HyperFlex clusters.

Administrators can create and publish a self-service private cloud service catalog. They can publish VM provisioning, multi-tier application infrastructure deployment or other advanced workloads to the UCS Director catalog for self-service execution. These VMs and applications are then available for end users to access using End User Portal (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Screenshot of Cisco UCS Director End User Portal

As a result, IaaS setup on HyperFlex dramatically reduces manual processes and drives better consistency across the data center. The self service capabilities reduce dependency on IT, allowing services to be quickly delivered on-demand while lowering operational costs for the organization.

Want to learn more?

Dive Deep Into HyperFlex With Technical Demos

Check out our Next-Generation Data Platform for Hyperconvergence whitepaper

Listen to our on-demand webinar on delivering Adaptive Hyperconvergence