In part 4 of UCS Director I am going to cover the automation features, more specifically workflows. I will also walk you through the process of creating a workflow that automates creating a new VLAN. I will apologize now for the length of this post but most of that is from all of the screen shots I provided. I recommend you click on the screen shots to view them in more detail in a new browser window.

I guess we should start by defining what a a workflow is in the context of UCS Director. A workflow is an organized set of tasks that can be executed to automate simple or complex IT process. This could be something as simple as provisioning a VM to provisioning a new UCS blade.

With UCS Director it is possible to move all of your internal infrastructure administration and provisioning into workflows. By doing this you can achieve better operational and configuration consistency. Another big advantage is that all tasks executed by a workflow are logged in detail and can be rolled back at any time. For example lets say I used a workflow to provision new VMFS storage for vSphere but now I don’t need that data store any more. With UCS Director I don’t have to create a de-provisioning workflow, I can go to the Service Request for when that data store was first provisioned and roll it back.

Another optional task you can easily add to workflows is the Admin Approval task that fires off an email to the user or users specified when the workflow is executed. This could essentially act as your change control approval process where each manager must approve before the tasks in the workflow are executed. The approver also has the option to add comments or reject the workflow with comments on why.

What I like about the automation capabilities of UCS-D is that you don’t have to be a developer or know any scripting to create workflows for automating infrastructure processes. Now if you want and have the development background you can create custom tasks in UCS-D to do almost anything you can dream up.

To access the workflows in UCS Director go to the Policies, Orchestration menu. Workflows are organized into folders and sub-folders, in the below screen shot the workflow folders, Default, NetApp UseCases and System are built-in. The other folders are ones that I have created.

UCS Director 5.1 comes with over 1100 built in tasks for managing and provisioning every aspect of the infrastructure elements that can be managed by UCS-D. There are also a lot of pre-built workflows that come with UCS Director, simple tasks like VM provisioning from templates or new VMs from ISO are some of the examples of the built-in workflows.

Here is a screen shot of just some of the built-in workflows that come with UCS Director.

Workflows can be exported and imported and shared with others or via this Cisco Communities site – Cisco Developed UCS Integrations

Now that we have went over what a workflow is lets go through the process of creating a workflow. To do this UCS Director provides a very intuitive tool called the Workflow Designer.

Before you jump right in and start creating workflows I highly recommend documenting the processes/tasks you want to automate. If you don’t already have these documented somewhere I would go through test runs of each process you want to automate documenting as you go through it. It is very important that the processes you want to automate are documented so that when you are creating the workflow you don’t miss something. Documenting the processes is also critical for change control.

Here is an example of the processes required to create a new VLAN

Before we can edit a workflow with the Workflow Designer we first need to create an empty workflow. To do this click the Add Workflow link on the Workflows tab, this brings up the Add Workflow wizard. The first page of the wizard prompts for basic information like the name, description, folder placement and options like sending the executing user status on workflow execution progress.

On the next page, Add User Inputs, I have added two user inputs. These are the inputs required from the user that executes the workflow, in this example the two inputs are VLAN Name and VLAN ID. The type of value for the name is generic text and vlanID for the VLAN ID input type.

There are lots of input types for just about anything you can imagine, here is an example of the input types window, notice how small the slider bar is, that should give you an idea of the amount of input types.

The next page in the Add Workflow wizard is for optional User Outputs.

Both Inputs and Outputs can be either user provided or admin provided and then used as variables in tasks of a workflow.

Now that our workflow is created we can edit it using the Workflow Designer, this can be accessed by either right-clicking the workflow or selecting the workflow and then clicking the workflow designer link on the tool bar.

If you right-click a workflow you also have the option to Clone, Execute, Export, create a new version or display.

The workflow designer window looks like this, all available tasks are on the left and the tasks in your workflow are on the right. The pre-configured tasks in all workflows include Start, Completed (Success) and Completed (Failed)

The first task we need to add to our workflow is a user approval task, this task is located under Cloupia Tasks, General Tasks or you can type approval in the filer box and it will show you all tasks with the word approval in the name. To add the user approval task select it and then drag it over the the right, when you release it a wizard will open that walks you through configuring the task. The first thing to configure is the name, make your task names are as descriptive as possible and provide a good description. The description is what is visible in the workflow execution service request details.

The User Approval task is very basic and requires very little input aside from the user or users you want to send approval to. I am also going to add a second User Approval task for the network admin.

Once both User Approval tasks are added I can logically organize them by clicking at the bottom of one task and linking it to the next task. Every task should have both an On Success and On Failure link.

It is best that you set the On Failure of each task linked to Completed (Failed) task

The next task will be creating the new VLAN on Core switch 1

The User Input Mapping page is where the two user inputs come into play, I will select them from the VLAN ID and VLAN Name drop downs.

On the Task Inputs page I will admin input the device by selecting it from a list of network switches that were previously added as an infrastructure element.

I can also select to save the device configuration or I can do that on a later task

For each of the network switches in the DC I will have a Create VLAN task and a corresponding allow VLAN on trunk task.

The finished workflow has 10 individual tasks, here is a screen shot of the full workflow

Now lets test it out, Execute the workflow and you are presented with the two user inputs.

After I click Submit the service request details window opens where I can monitor the progress and view the detailed log. Until the two approvals are accepted the workflow will pause.

If I login as the jwaldrop user and go to Approvals I can see the pending request

When I click Approve the service request details open where I can add a comment and then click Approve

Now when I go back to the service request details I will see the approval and comment

After both users have approved the workflow it continues with creating the VLAN

Once the workflow is complete we can check to make sure the new VLAN exists.

Here is one of the Nexus 5548 switches with the new VLAN and the updated trunks where the vlan is allowed.

In the accounting log I can see where the ucsd-admin created VLAN 300 and added it to the trunks

In UCS I can see that the vlan was created and added to the vNIC templates

And in vSphere I can see the Add Distributed Port Group task and the new dvPortGroup

Take a look at the detailed logging that UCS Director provides, the log tab shows every single change made in detail down to the actual commands executed

The Input/Output tab also shows a lot of useful info, if for some reason any task failed I could use this info for troubleshooting

Now lets look at the roll back capabilities, lets assume this new VLAN that was created is no longer needed or if you realized that this is the incorrect VLAN ID and you want to undo everything the workflow just did. You are probably thinking that we need to create another workflow to Delete VLAN but since the VLAN was created with a UCS-D workflow we can use the powerful Rollback capabilities.

Under the Organizations, Service Requests menu and I can see all of the workflow service requests.

If I right-click on the service request that created VLAN 300 I can choose Rollback Request

This opens a window where I can choose to rollback all tasks or just select tasks.

Just like the service request to create the VLAN the rollback request also requires admin approval and has the same detailed logging

And here is the completed rollback request

This was just one example of the types of IT infrastructure processes that can be automated with UCS Director. Other workflows that I have created are:

1. Zone a new host on the SAN Fabric and present LUNs from an EMC VNX
2. Create new VMFS LUN on VNX, present it to all ESXi hosts and format the new LUN with VMFS
3. Create a new VLAN like the one above but this one includes all of the Nexus 1000v tasks
4. Bare metal provisioning of a new UCS blade, this includes all of the UCS, zoning, SAN Provisioning, ESXi install and vCenter tasks

Here is a screen shot of the workflow to provision a new UCS, ESXi host from bare metal all the way into vCenter.

It has been far too long since my last post, no real excuse for it I simply lost motivation to blog.

Since my last post on UCS Director there have been two significant versions released. Review these release notes to see what’s new in each release.

Cisco UCS Director Release Notes, Release 5.0

Cisco UCS Director Release Notes, Release 5.1

One of the nice new features of 5.1 is a Guided Setup tool that provides wizards that walk you through the initial system configuration. The Guided Setup screen automatically opens on login unless you have chosen the option not to display it again. If you do not see the Guided Setup screen you can access it at any time from the Administration, Guided Setup menu.

I highly recommend using the Initial System Configuration wizard to configure licensing, SMTP, DNS and NTP settings.

Aside from the Guided Setup there really wasn’t much that changed with regards to the initial installation and configuration since 4.1.

In this post I will go over adding the infrastructure elements that will be managed by UCS Director. For a list of supported infrastructure elements that UCS Director can manage refer to this matrix – Compatibility Matrix for Cisco UCS Director, Release 5.1

In the lab these infrastructure elements will be as follows:

1. Compute – Cisco UCS B-Series
2. Storage – EMC VNX 5300
3. Network Switches – A pair of Nexus 5500s and one Catalyst 3750
4. Virtualization – VMware vSphere 5.5

Before adding your infrastructure elements there are a few design considerations. UCS Director organizes infrastructure elements into Pods and Pods into sites. This Site and Pod structure must be defined so that when you add each infrastructure element UCS Director knows which pod that element is tied to. The pod definition is also where you tell UCS Director what type of pod and license to expect. The pod types are as follows:

• FlexPod
• Generic
• ExpressPod Medium
• ExpressPod Small
• VSPEX
• Vblock

For me this was very simple; one site named Greensboro and one Pod name GSO-LAB.

The next design consideration is around what user accounts you are going to use to add each infrastructure element to UCS Director. The simplest thing to do is to use the default admin account for each element. There are a couple problems with doing this, one is that you or that elements admin will not be able to look at audit logs to see what changes UCS Director made. The other problem is that if the elements admin wants to restrict UCS Director from managing the device the default admin password has to be changed.

The best practice is to create a UCS Director specific account on each infrastructure element or better yet if each element is using LDAP, RADIUS or TACACS a UCS Director Active Directory account can be leveraged.

Another new feature of UCS Director 5.x are the Credential Policies. I really like this feature because it makes it easier to add like devices and manage the credentials UCS-D uses to communicate with those devices. For example most environments will have multiple network and storage switches with common credentials. For this I can create a credential policy for SSH with the username and password that is common. When I add each network element I can choose the credential policy and not have to key in the same username and password a lot of times.

Before adding infrastructure elements I highly recommend creating a credential policy for the network/storage switches. To do this go to Policies, Physical Infrastructure Policies, Credential Policies menu.

In my case I created a new user in each element named ucsd-admin and for simplicity sake set the password the same on each element.

After each infrastructure element had a UCS Director account I added each to UCS Director starting with UCS.

Adding UCS is very straightforward.

1. Go to Administration, Physical accounts
2. On the Physical accounts tab click Add
3. Select the desired Pod, select Computing for the Category and UCSM for account type
4. Provide the info for IP, login and other optional info

The next account to add is the EMC VNX SAN. This one is bit more involved because for some reason Cisco decided not to include the NaviSecCli command line tool as part of the UCS Director Appliance. NaviSecCli is the only way to manage VNX block from the command line as there isn’t an API or SSH capability for VNX block management. In previous versions of UCS Director the NaviSecCli tool was included with the appliance.

In UCS Director 5.x you must build a Linux VM, install the Linux NaviSecCli tool and then point UCS Director at the Linux VM. It wasn’t very difficult to build a Linux VM with NaviSecCli it was just a big annoyance. Here is a summary of the steps to get this Linux VM built and configured:

1. Download CentOS 6.4 minimal install ISO
2. Build a new VM and install CentOS
3. Download the Linux EMC NaviSecCli RPM and install it on the new VM
4. Test NaviSecCli from the Linux VM to verify communication with the VNX

Once you have the Linux VM built go to Administration, Physical Account menu and Physical Account tab and click Add.

Select the pod, select Storage for the Category and EMC VNX Block or Unified for type

Fill in the required info for the Control Station IP, Storage Processor IPs, NaviSecCli Host IP and credentials.

Next go over to the Managed Network Elements tab and add your network and SAN switches. Adding these is very straight forward and this is where the Credential Policies can be leveraged.

Lastly add your virtualization platform, this is located under the Administration, Virtual Accounts menu. When you select Add you are presented with this prompt to select your virtualization platform.

Once all of your infrastructure elements are added go over to the Converged menu to see your Pod with the various infrastructure elements. If you had an environment with multiple Pods you would see all of the Pods listed here or if you had multiple sites you can select the Site from the Site drop-down list.

If you select the Pod it will expand to show you each element in more detail

From here you can then double-click each element to drill down into the details of that element, view the inventory and even configure.

Here is what the VMware details looks like. The summary tab has some high level utilization reports and connection information. Each one of these individual reports can be added to a custom dashboard tied to your specific UCS Director account.

Over on the VM tab if you select a VM and then click on the purple button on the top right you can see all of the configuration options available. Most of what a user can do to a VM in the vSphere Client is available through UCS Director.

Another really cool view on the VMware, VM tab is the Stack View that shows you where a specific VM lives on each infrastructure element. This level of visibility across all infrastructure elements in the data center stack is very awesome.

Over on the Top 5 Reports tab there are several utilization and performance reports that you ran run on demand

The Topology tab is similar to the vSphere Client maps but a bit more useful

The Map Reports tab has some very useful heat maps for looking at various resource usage data.

All of the other infrastructure elements can be managed, monitored and run reports against similar to vSphere.

With UCS Director it is possible for a company to use it for the management of all of their data center infrastructure instead of managing each infrastructure element individually through their management console.

UCS Director has some great built-in reports and a Report Builder to create custom reports on anything managed by UCS Director. Here is a list of the built-in reports that come with UCS Director.

Here is what the UCS Data Center Inventory Report looks like

Here is a custom report created with the Report Builder showing the UCS Firmware versions

Hopefully my next post will not be 6 months from now but in the very near future. I hope to cover UCS Director Workflows in Part 4.

In Part 1 I went over the features and capabilities of Cisco UCS Director. In part 2 I am going to cover the deployment of the UCS Director Virtual Appliance into a VMware vSphere environment.

The Cisco official installation guide can be found here – http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/ucs-director/vsphere-install-guide/4-1/b_Installing_UCSDirector_on_vSphere_41.html

Being that UCS Director is distributed via a Virtual Appliance the deployment and initial IP address configuration is very straightforward.

Obliviously before the appliance can be deployed the OVF ZIP must be downloaded from Cisco.

1. Extract the download ZIP, the download ZIP is around 2.5GB and the OVF/VMDK must be extracted before you can deploy it.
   
2. Once extracted you should have 2 files; cucsd_4_1_0_0.ovf and system.vmdk
   
3. From the vSphere Client go to the file menu and select Deploy OVF Template…
4. Browse out to where the cucsd_4_1_0_0.ovf file is located and select it
   
5. OVF Template Details
   
6. Provide a VM name and inventory location
   
7. Select a VM data store
   
8. Disk Format
   
9. Select the VM network you want the UCS Director in. It isn’t very intuitive but there is a drop-down box in the Destination Networks column. Ignore the warning at the bottom.
   
10. Ignore the DCHP warning here, during the first boot of the VM appliance you are prompted for a static IP.
    
11. After the VM appliance has finished deploying open the VM console and power it on. During boot you will be prompted to set an IP address.
    
12. Once the UCS Director VM appliance is up verify you can ping it and then open a Web Browser to the IP address. The default login is admin, admin
    
13. This is what you see on first login
    
14. Change the default admin password and create a new user for yourself. To do this go to Administration, Users and Groups
    
15. If you have a license upload and apply it under Administration, Licensing
    

In Part 3 we will get add our infrastructure components and get into the real meat of UCS Director.

Now that I have finally finished up with the CCIE DC I have time to spend on some of the new technology that I have pushed to the side in the last 6 months.

I first heard of UCS Director (Cloupia at the time) about 2 years ago before Cisco acquired them. I was immediately excited about the possibilities this software brings to the table. While I enjoy manually building out new UCS Service Profiles, zoning, provisioning SAN storage and loading ESXi there is something to be said for automating all of those mundane processes.

UCS Director is like having an easy button in UCSM that provisions new compute, storage and networking resources with the click of a button.

Aside from to provisioning automation UCS Director also has extensive management, monitoring and self-service provisioning of physical and virtual servers. Here is are a couple of tables copied from the install guide features list

Over the next month or so I will be getting UCS Director up on our lab to kick the tires on it. I really think there is a lot of value in this product for a lot of current UCS customers.