Cisco UCS Central includes the following features:
Centralized inventory : Manual inventory spreadsheets are no longer needed. Cisco UCS Central automatically aggregates a global inventory of all Cisco UCS components, organized by domain, with customizable refresh schedules. Cisco UCS Central provides even easier integration with ITIL processes, with direct access to the inventory through an XML interface.
Centralized fault summary : Quickly and easily view the status of all registered Cisco UCS domains with a quick-look global fault summary panel, a fault summary organized by domain and fault type, with views into individual Cisco UCS domains for greater fault detail and more rapid problem resolution.
Centralized policy-based firmware upgrades : Take the guesswork and manual errors out of updating infrastructure firmware. You can download firmware updates automatically from the Cisco.com website to a firmware library within Cisco UCS Central. Then you can update the firmware for registered domains, globally or selectively, on an automated schedule or as your business workloads allow. Managing firmware centrally helps ensure compliance with IT standards and makes reprovisioning of resources a point-and-click operation.
Global ID pooling : Eliminate identifier conflicts and help ensure portability of software licenses with Cisco UCS Central. Centralize the sourcing of all IDs, such as universal user IDs (UUIDs), MAC addresses, IP addresses, and worldwide names (WWNs), from global pools and gain real-time ID use summaries. Centralizing server identifier information makes it simple to, for example, move server identifiers between Cisco UCS domains anywhere in the world and reboot an existing workload to run on the new server.
Domain grouping and subgrouping : Simplify policy management by creating domain groups and subgroups. A domain group is an arbitrary grouping of Cisco UCS domains that can be used to group systems into geographical or organizational groups. Each domain group can have up to five levels of subdomains, which makes it easy to manage policy exceptions when administering large numbers of Cisco UCS domains. Each subdomain has a hierarchical relationship with the parent domain.
Global administrative policies : Help ensure compliance and staff efficiency with global administrative policies. These policies are defined at the domain group level and can manage anything in the infrastructure, from date and time and user authentication to equipment power and system event log (SEL) policies.
Cisco UCS Central XML API : Cisco UCS Central, just like Cisco UCS Manager, has a high-level industry-standard XML API for interfacing with existing management frameworks and orchestration tools. The XML API for Cisco UCS Central is similar to the XML API for Cisco UCS Manager, making integration with high-level management software very fast.
Cisco UCS Manager backups : The backup facility in Cisco UCS Central enables you to quickly and efficiently back up the configuration from Cisco UCS Manager in registered Cisco UCS domains. You can configure automated backups to occur on a specific schedule, or perform manual backups as your business needs require.
