UCS Central available NOW

Last Thursday Cisco released version 1.0 of their new multi-UCS-domain management tool,
UCS Central and now it is generally available.

UCS Central is a product that enables IT administrators to manage multiple UCS domains that are managed through individual UCS Managers from a single location through a single interface. UCS Central works closely with UCS Manager and provides consolidated management functionality for multi-UCS-installations. It uses a policy management framework similar to UCS Manager but provides a broader scope of these policies across multiple UCS domains.

In addition, it also provides consolidation of data such as hardware and firmware inventory, faults, ID pools. The product is deployed as a virtual machine that works with the multiple UCS managers. UCS Central manages thousands of physical blade and rack servers that are integrated with UCS fabric interconnects distributed across multiple UCS domains. UCS Central provides a intuitive web based GUI and an accompanying CLI for user access . It also provides an XML API similar to the one found in UCS Manager to provide automation and integration capabilities with higher level systems management tools.

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

Cisco UCS Central release 1.0(1a) supports the following:

• UCS Domain Groups;
• Integrated Dashboard;
• UCS Domains;
• Fabric Interconnects, Chassis, IO Modules, Blade and Integrated Rack Servers Inventory;
• Domain Level Service Profiles & Templates;
• Firmware;
• Fault, Audit, Event Logs;
• FSM Status;
• Global ID Management;
• WWPN, WWNN, WWxN Pools;
• IP Pools;
• MAC Pools;
• UUID Suffix Pools;
• IQN Pools;
• Global ID Usage Tracking;
• Centralized Firmware Management;
• Cisco.com Automated Firmware download & Image Repository;
• Maintenance Policy & Schedules;
• Host Firmware Packs, Infrastructure Firmware Packs, Catalog;
• Global Operational Policies;
• DNS, Timezone, Call Home, SNMP;
• HTTP, Telnet, Web Sessions, CIM XML, Management Interface Monitoring, SSH;
• LDAP, TACACS, RADIUS, Roles, Locales, Trust Points, Authentication Domains;
• Fault, Core Export, Syslog;
• Power Allocation, PSU, SEL;
• Global Backup/Export Policy;
• UCS Manager Policy Globalization;
• Backup Repository and Restore;
• UCS Manager KVM & GUI cross launch;
• OVA, ISO, BIN formats for multi hypervisor support (ESX, Hyper-V).