Manage multiple Cisco UCS domains with one tool

Today I visited the Cisco booth here at VMworld 2012 in Barcelona and got a inside view of the UCS Central. UCS Central is a tool Cisco is working on to manage multiple Cisco UCS systems/domains. At the moment it is still in beta but they expect to release it Nov/Dec 2012.

UCS Central is serves as the UCS central nervous system and integrates all UCS components across multiple UCS domains, managing server blades, VMs, storage and networking—across multiple chassis—as a single logical domain. UCS Central provides an intuitive GUI with a command-line interface (CLI) and XML API options. It enables real-time configuration and reconfiguration of resources. The built-in XML API provides an open management framework for customers, developers, system integrators and managed service providers to interoperate with Cisco Unified Computing System resources.

This tool is ideal for customers who are using multiple Cisco UCS systems on the same location or across different locations in standalone or disaster recovery scenarios. The tool will be free of charge for a limited number of Cisco UCS systems (probably 5). Above that it’s not free but who cares if you can manage 25 Cisco UCS domains with one single management tool as Cisco is doing in their labs right now.

It requires Cisco UCS Manager 2.1 firmware to run and it will be deployed as an appliance (OVA) within vSphere.

I’m really looking forward to this as we are seeing more an more customers deploy multiple UCS domains and this is a much needed addition to have that single pane of glass for cross data center UCS domains. I think this will convince even more customers to leave HP, IBM, Dell, etc. and go for a Cisco UCS solution.