As part of my day job I create demos and run demos for UCS Director (UCSD), but what is UCSD?
Its focus is on providing IaaS type capabilities (I some times refer to this as a foundation for IaaS) for your data centre, helping you on the journey to provide an on-premises private cloud. The name can cause confusion as it is not dependant on UCS (although great value in using in a UCS environment), it is a multi-vendor multi-technology solution.
It will allow you to manage (both virtual and physical);
- Virtualisation
- Compute
- Storage
- Network
I always think a picture/diagram helps (guess thats why I end up using a whiteboard a lot). I created a deck and demo for a Cisco TechHuddle recently and I think one of the slides gives a good overview of the solution;
The key features you get with UCSD are;
- Automation/Orchestration - rich set of out of the box tasks (1,300 +)
- Bare Metal Builds
- Lifecycle management of Infrastructure
- High-level collection of useful metrics
- Reports
- Chargeback/showback
The TechHuddle was run in a number of Cisco offices around the UK&I in which I presented in both Dublin and Manchester. A colleague covered the London session which was recored and posted on YouTube. If you want to get an overview of some of the capabilities I suggest having a watch.
Now that the product has been reference at a high level I will start to create blog entires on how to setup and configure the tool. This will include useful examples. If you would like to see something just reach out to me.