About this Course

UCS Director is a centralized management solution that enables IT departments to experience the full benefits of their converged infrastructure investment by continuing to reduce TCO and save staff time with transparent unified management. UCS Director enables organizations to build their own internal private clouds as well as manage public clouds. UCS Director is a vendor-neutral, multi-hypervisor, and multi-cloud provisioning and management solution that provides physical and virtual infrastructure control, management, and monitoring via a single pane of glass. UCS Director addresses the complex challenges of building, deploying, and managing a wide variety of IT services in private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud environments. With UCS Director, organizations achieve faster service delivery, greater IT agility, and significant cost savings. UCS Director significantly improves service levels and operational efficiencies by providing service-centric IT management with end-to-end automation capabilities.

The goal of this two-day training is to describe the architecture, capabilities, and implementation details of the UCS Director platform. After completing this training, attendees will be able to realize the technical and business benefits that UCS Director provides, as well as perform the installation and basic configuration tasks required for the initial proof of concept deployment of the UCS Director solution.

Audience Profile

Technical Decision Makers 

At Course Completion

Upon completing this course, students will be able to:

• Describe the UCS Director solution, value proposition, and key differentiators
• Describe UCS Director components and implementation
• Explain UCS Director basic administrative tasks and settings including role-based access control, LDAP integration, interface customization, and shell admin
• Describe physical infrastructure management capabilities and configuration of UCS Director.
• Explain virtual infrastructure management capabilities and configuration of UCS Director including virtual accounts, virtual data centers, and policy management
• Describe self-service portal and self-service catalog capabilities of UCS Director
• Discuss UCS Director Orchestration processes and capabilities

Prerequisites

Required: General Datacenter skills related to design, deployment, and operations of converged infrastructure, based on the Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus platforms

Optional: Design, deployment, and operations experience with VMware vSphere, NetApp storage, Microsoft Hyper-V, EMC VNX, and/or EMC VMAX

Course Outline

Lesson 1: UCS Director Installation

• Configure System and Infrastructure Parameters
• Configure Advanced Control and Menu Settings
• Add Users and Groups
• Set System Parameters
• Mail Settings
• Configure RBAC, Users, and Groups
• LDAP Integration
• UCS Director User Interface Customization
• Options Available via ShellAdmin

Lesson 2: Virtual and Physical Infrastructure Management

• Physical Accounts in UCS Director
• UCS Overview
• Infrastructure Discovery and Administration
• Virtual Accounts in UCSD
• UCSD Physical Infrastructure Support

Lesson 3: Managing VDCs, Tenants, and Policies

• Cloud Accounts in UCS Director
• UCS Director Policies
• Virtual Data Centers
• Chargeback Reports
• Cost Model Setup
• Advanced Cost Model Setup
• Storage Tier Cost Model Setup
• Managing Reports and Monitoring

Lesson 4: Catalog and Self-Service Portal Management

• Catalog Management
• Self-Service Portal User Interface
• Catalogs and Services
• Self-Service Virtual and Physical Infrastructure
• Accounting, Approvals, and Reports

Lesson 5: UCS Director Orchestration

• Key Capabilities and Use Cases
• Workflow UI Designer
• Basic Orchestration Elements
• The Orchestration Task Library

Lesson 6: UCS Director Virtualization

• UCS Director Virtualization Features
• Benefits of Cisco UCS Director for VMware
• Operations and Automation Features for VMware
• Use Cases for VMware Virtual Cloud Design and Management

Labs

• Lab 1: Use UCS Director as an End User
• Lab 2: Basic Administration
• Lab 3: UCS Director Physical Infrastructure Setup
• Lab 4: UCS Director Virtual Infrastructure Setup
• Lab 5: Self-Service Portal Management
• Lab 6: UCSD Orchestration
• Lab 7: UCS Provision a VM using ISO