Scale Cisco UCS Domains Across Global Data Centers

As organizations scale their Cisco UCS infrastructure, managing it consistently with global policies is ever more important. Cisco UCS Central manages multiple Cisco UCS instances (or domains) across globally distributed data centers, allowing IT departments to enjoy the benefits of simplified, unified management of compute, network, and storage access resources.

Features and Capabilities

Simplify Operations at Scale

Cisco UCS Central software manages multiple, globally distributed Cisco UCS domains with thousands of servers from a single pane. It can simplify global policy compliance. Using SingleConnect Technology, Cisco UCS provides unified, embedded management of all software and hardware components with the Cisco UCS Manager. Every instance of Cisco UCS Manager and all of the components managed by it form a domain. Cisco UCS Central integrates with Cisco UCS Manager, and utilizes it to provide global configuration capabilities for pools, policies, and firmware.

Increase Global Visibility and Control

Cisco UCS Central aggregates inventory and fault information across multiple Cisco UCS domains to facilitate service assurance for the Cisco UCS infrastructure. Like Cisco UCS Manager, it exposes an XML API for integration with customer and partner management solutions.

Provide Flexibility

Cisco UCS Central software does not replace Cisco UCS Manager, which is the basic engine for server management in individual Cisco UCS domains. Unlike Cisco UCS Manager, which is embedded in the Fabric Interconnects, Cisco UCS Central is a virtual machine image that can be run on a hypervisor to provide powerful compute infrastructure management.

Cisco UCS Central can provide global definition capabilities for policies and resource pools which can be flexibly allocated across distributed data centers. This enables administrators to follow a "define once, deploy many times" workflow for their compute infrastructure.

For more information

• Find out more about SingleConnect Technology which makes management of blade and rack servers together, possible
• Review the best practices guide for deploying UCS Central
• Find out about Cisco UCS Director for integrated infrastructure management. Attend Live UCS Director Webinar

For additional resources like the UCS Platform Emulator, developer guides and management tips visit the Cisco UCS user community

Specifications at a Glance

• Complements Cisco UCS Manager
• Helps enable management of multiple domains across data centers and geographies
• Provides model-based management and an XML API for large-scale automation
• Simplifies global operations with a centralized view of inventory, faults, and logs
• Facilitates the use of global policies, ID pools, and firmware management
• Provides a foundation for high availability, disaster recovery, and workload mobility

Models and Documents