Infrastructure as a Service
Cisco UCS Director delivers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for both virtual and physical infrastructure. With Cisco UCS Director, you can create an application container template that defines the infrastructure required for a specific application or how a customer or business unit is expected to use that application. Cisco UCS Director helps IT teams to define the rules for the business’s infrastructure services:
• Either you can first onboard tenants and then define the boundaries of the physical and virtual infrastructure that they can use, or you can allow your onboarded tenants to define the infrastructure boundaries.
• Create policies, orchestration workflows, and application container templates in Cisco UCS Director that define the requirements for a specific type of application that can be used by a tenant, such as a web server, database server, or generic virtual machine (VM).
• Publish these templates as a catalog in the End User Portal.
Users can go to the End User Portal, select the catalog that meets their needs, and make a service request for that particular application or VM. Their service request triggers the appropriate orchestration workflow to allocate the required infrastructure and provision the application or VM.
If the service request requires approvals, Cisco UCS Director sends emails to the specified approver(s). Once the service request is approved, Cisco UCS Director assigns the infrastructure to those users, creating a virtual machine if necessary, and doing the base configuration, such as provisioning the operating system. You can also configure an orchestration workflow to ask questions before allowing a user to choose a catalog item. Here are some points to keep in mind:
• You can configure the workflow to ask the user what type of application they plan to run and automatically select a catalog for them based on the answers to those questions.
• The end user does not have to worry about whether to request a physical server or a VM, what kind of storage they require, or which operating system to install. Everything is predefined and prepackaged in the catalog.
For example, you can create policies, orchestration workflows, and an application container template for an SAP application that uses a minimum level of infrastructure, requires approvals from a director in the company, and has a chargeback to the department. When an end user makes a service request in the End User Portal for that catalog item, Cisco UCS Director does the following:
1. Sends an email to the director, who is the required approver.
2. When the approval is received, Cisco UCS Director creates a VM in the appropriate pod with four CPUs, 10GB of memory, and 1TB of storage.
3. Installs an operating system (OS) on the VM.
4. Notifies the end user that the VM is available for them to use.
5. Sets up the chargeback account for the cost of the VM.
With the available APIs from Cisco UCS Director, you can also script custom workflows to pre-install the SAP application in the VM after the OS is installed.
Cisco UCS Director enables you to automate a wide array of tasks and use cases across a wide variety of supported Cisco and non-Cisco hardware and software data center components, including physical infrastructure automation at the compute, network, and storage layers. A few examples of the use cases that you can automate include, but are not limited to, the following:
• VM provisioning and lifecycle management
• Network resource configuration and lifecycle management
• Storage resource configuration and lifecycle management
• Tenant onboarding and infrastructure configuration
• Application infrastructure provisioning
• Self-service catalogs and VM provisioning
• Bare-metal server provisioning, including installation of an operating system
For each of the processes that you decide to automate with orchestration workflows, you can choose to implement the processes in any of the following ways:
• Use the out-of-the-box workflows provided with Cisco UCS Director.
• Modify the out-of-the-box workflows with one or more of the tasks provided with Cisco UCS Director.
• Create your own custom tasks and use them to customize the out-of-the-box workflows.
• Create your own custom workflows with custom tasks and the out-of-the-box tasks.
Beginning with version 6.6, Cisco UCS Director can be claimed as a managed device in Intersight, so usage data, license usage, and so on can be collected. UCS Director administrators can update UCS Director southbound connectors that are used to communicate with supported devices, including networking and storage platforms, during a maintenance window for rapid delivery of new features and functionality. This will enable users to leverage endpoint capabilities and APIs faster through UCS Director by enabling the update of device libraries. Figure 3-12 illustrates Cisco UCS Director Intersight integration.
Figure 3-12 Cisco UCS Director Intersight integration
The benefits of SaaS and CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) can be achieved by claiming on-premises UCS Director instances in Intersight. Once these are claimed, the traditional on-premises software is transformed into a secure hybrid SaaS setup that delivers ongoing new capabilities:
• Automatic downloads of software enhancements upgrades, bug fixes, and updates for the following:
• UCS Director Base Platform Pack
• System Update Manager
• Infrastructure specific Connector Packs (EMC storage, F5 load balancers, RedHat KVM)
• Enhanced problem resolution with Cisco Support through Intersight
• Proactive notifications and streamlined “one-click” diagnostics collection
Figure 3-13 illustrates Cisco UCS Director Intersight integration benefits.
Figure 3-13 Cisco UCS Director Intersight integration benefits
UCS Director–specific dashboard widgets can be added to provide useful summary information for the following:
• Instance summary
• Service status summary
• Last backup status
• Trends for last 10 backups
Figure 3-14 shows the UCS Director dashboard widgets in Intersight.
Figure 3-14 UCS Director dashboard widgets in Intersight
It is possible for an Intersight workflow to call a UCSD workflow, if desired, which can allow an organization to gradually migrate to Intersight as the primary orchestrator. However, the UCS Director and Intersight workflows are not compatible, and they cannot be directly imported from UCS Director into Intersight.
With Cisco ACI, you can create application infrastructure containers that contain the appropriate network services as well as support infrastructure components for each respective application. Figure 3-15 illustrates UCS Director integration with ACI.
Figure 3-15 UCS Director integration with ACI
The following are the business benefits of Cisco UCS Director and Cisco ACI integration:
• Cisco UCS Director and Cisco ACI integrate through native tasks and prebuilt workflows.
• This integration supports IaaS with three main features:
• Secure multitenancy
• Rapid application deployment
• Self-service portal
Secure Multitenancy
The integrated solution provides consistent delivery of infrastructure components that are ready to be consumed by clients in a secured fashion. Here are some key points concerning secure multitenancy:
• The solution optimizes resource sharing capabilities and provides secure isolation of clients without compromising quality of service (QoS) in a shared environment.
• To provide IaaS, secure multitenancy reserves resources for exclusive use and securely isolate them from other clients.
• Cisco ACI supports multitenancy by using Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) tunnels internally within the fabric, inherently isolating tenant and application traffic.
• Cisco UCS Director manages the resource pools assigned to each container. Only Cisco supports secure multitenancy that incorporates both physical and virtual resources.
Rapid Application Deployment
The combination of Cisco UCS Director and Cisco ACI enhances your capability to rapidly deploy application infrastructure for you and your clients. With the increasing demands of new applications and the elastic nature of cloud environments, administrators need to be able to quickly design and build application profiles and publish them for use by clients. Cisco UCS Director, in conjunction with Cisco ACI, gives you the ability to quickly meet the needs of your clients. Here are some key points concerning rapid application deployment:
• Cisco UCS Director interacts with Cisco ACI to automatically implement the networking services that support applications. In Cisco UCS Director, you can specify a range of Layer 4 through Layer 7 networking services between application layers that are deployed with a zero-touch automated configuration model.
• You can dynamically place workloads based on current network conditions so that service levels are maintained at the appropriate level for the applications being supported by the client.
• You can use resource groups to establish tiers of resources based on application requirements, including computing, networking, and storage resources, with varying levels of performance. For example, a bronze level of service might be used for developers and include resources such as thin-provisioned storage and virtualized computing resources. In contrast, a gold level of service might be used for production environments and include thick-provisioned storage and bare-metal servers for performance without compromise.
• After your resources and services are deployed, you can monitor your application infrastructure with real-time health scores, dynamically reconfigure your network if necessary to meet your performance goals, and obtain resource consumption information that can be used for charging clients.
• Cisco UCS Director in conjunction with Cisco ACI also provides complete application infrastructure lifecycle management, returning resources to their respective free pools and eliminating stranded resources.
Self-Service Portal
After you have defined or adopted a set of application profiles, you can make them available to clients in a service catalog visible in the self-service portal. Your clients can log in to Cisco UCS Director’s self-service portal, view the service catalog published by your organization, and order the infrastructure as desired.
The application profiles you define can be parameterized so that clients can provide attributes during the ordering process to customize infrastructure to meet specific needs.
For example, clients can be allowed to specify the number of servers deployed in various application infrastructure tiers or the amount of storage allocated to each database server. After your clients have placed their orders, they can monitor the status of application infrastructure orders, view the progress of application infrastructure deployment, and perform lifecycle management tasks.