Integrating Cisco UCS Manager with VMware vCenter

Have Cisco UCS Servers? Use Different management tools(UCS manager for cisco and vCenter for VMware) to manage the blades and your virtual environment?

What if i say you can manage all your virtual and physical servers in a single management pane? In your vCenter?

Yes, Cisco UCS-vCenter integration plugin is the solution. It brings capabilities of UCS Manager into vCenter and you can use your vCenter to manage all your Cisco Blades.

This Plug-in works only with vSphere 5.1 and above and needs web client to work with. If you don’t have web client in place then you will have to install it.

Believe me its worth it.

Lets jump in to the installation steps and see how this configuration is done and see how the Integrating Cisco UCS Manager with VMware vCenter goes.

Pre-requisites:

1.     As already mentioned, the plug-in only runs on vSphere 5.1 within the Web Client.
2.     VMware PowerCLI version 5.1 should be installed on the machine where we’ll be doing the actual install – Download it here

We will have to Download the Plug-in from here.  Download the ZIP file that is available and extract RegisterVCPplugin.ZIP on a machine where we have installed the PowerCLI.

run the extracted file. If we choose to use Enter plugin URL, We will have to download the plugin package and put it on our web-server so its available over an URL.

Enter the IP/Hostname of the vCenter where the plugin has to be installed.

If Hostname is used then the machine where the installer is running should have DNS configured to resolve the Hostname.

Now login into your web-client if the previous step completed successfully.

Next we need to register our UCS domain(s) with the Web Client.  Click on the Cisco UCS and then click on “Register” at the bottom of the screen.

We’ll have to enter the details once we click on Register.

If the registration was successful we will be able to see the registered domain in the vSphere Web client. Repeat the steps if you have more than one UCS Domains.

Now the registration is done. We will see how to navigate and see the components of UCS Equipment in next few steps.

In the Web Client, click on vCenter -> UCS Domains

we should be able to see the domain registered in the web client screen

Now you can see all the servers in every chassis

We will be able to take kvm console for individual blade servers. Launch UCS Manager and other functions.

Apart from modifying things related to service profiles we can do all the management tasks like taking KVM console and monitoring the errors.

Hopefully Cisco lets us do more tasks using this plugin in future releases.

Do install this plugin and explore.