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2Cisco UCS Manager
3Backing Up, Part 1
Here you see me preparing to back up all of my UCS system configuration. The backup file is stored on the network. To be clear, this backup is not a backup of applications but rather a configuration settings backup. There is room for improvement here: There is no currently no way to schedule the backup operation, and it’s easy to accidentally overwrite previous backups.
4Backing Up, Part 2
5CLI
6Equipment
Moving on from administering the UCS, you now see the Equipment tab. In UCS parlance, equipment is actually existing hardware, as opposed to objects covered in other parts of the UCS Manager, which are logical representations. Starting from the top left and moving down and to the right, you see that this UCS management domain currently has a single chassis that has eight backplane ports. To the right you see the currently installed firmware on the interface cards and the BMC (baseboard management controller). The BMC is a microcontroller on the physical server blade that provides the status of hardware components, including failures and temperature.
7Equipment, Hybrid Display of the Fabric Interconnects.
This hybrid display of physical and logical connections shows how Fabric Interconnects A and B are connected to the Fabric Extender. This Fabric Extender (every physical chassis has at least one) is what enables the UCS to scale without adding to management interface complexity. Shown here is chassis 1. Subsequent chassis would show up as chassis 2, chassis 3 and so on.
8More on Hybrid Display
9Equipment, IO Module, General View.
10Equipment, Chassis 1, Server 1, Inventory, CPU
11Equipment, Chassis 1, Server 1, Inventory, Memory
12Topology View
13Global Policies
14General Display of Fabric Interconnect
15Fabric Interconnect, Configuration
16LAN MAC Pool Configuration
17LAN Pin Group
18Pin Group Successfully Created
19vNIC Template
20SAN WWPN Pool
21SAN Pin Group Creation
22vHBA Template Creation
23Server UUID Suffix Pool
By now you can see the importance of resource pools to the administration of a Cisco UCS management domain. Here I’m creating a pool of SMBIOS UUIDs that will be assigned to servers created in the UCS management domain. Drawing resources from the pool is an essential aspect of automation and flexible reassignment of resources in the Cisco UCS world.
24Service Profile Template
Here you see the first step in creating a Service Profile template. Service Profiles are central to the way UCS works. The Service Profile is used to ensure that the associated server hardware has a configuration that will support the applications that it hosts. Service Profile templates, as the name implies, enabled me to create similar service profiles without having to constantly re-enter data that is common to the associated servers.
25Create vHBA
Here, I’m beginning the process of defining the storage associated with this Service Profile.