It took almost two months to finally unveil the software layer that manages the new Unified Computing System (UCS) blade system, but Cisco finally made it.
On its corporate Data Center Networks blog Cisco shows the GUI details and workflow in two parts videos.
UCS Manager seems very complex and granular, it exposes the full hardware for each blade, it exposes the logical servers that you want to create aggregating multiple blades in the system, it exposes the networking and the storage layer, and of course it exposes the virtual machines inside each blade.
Each of these layers can be restricted by a role-base access control system.
Unfortunately, and this seems done on purpose, Cisco doesn’t show the details of the virtual machines administration functions. Nonetheless the videos are well worth watching:
- Part 1 – Overview [9:27] (low quality / high quality)
- Part 2 – Service Profiles [10:19] (low quality / high quality)
As usual Chad Sakac, VP of VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, has further details about it.