Orchestration engine :
* On-demand rollout of infrastructure components, bare-metal servers, and virtualized resources with automated configuration, deployment, and management of data center infrastructure stacks.
* Library of more than 2500 multivendor tasks for creating end-to-end infrastructure services.
* Detection of resource changes coupled with resource movement to update workflows.
* Extended automation of tasks such as Bare-metal server software installation; physical network and storage provisioning; Storage-Area Network (SAN) zoning; virtual machine provisioning with software stack and database installation; disaster-recovery failover; and decommissioning of servers, hosts, and virtual machines.
Cisco Intersight enabled CI/CD for Cisco UCS Director :
* Ability to automatically download periodic software enhancements upgrades, bug fixes and updates to UCS Director installation through Cisco Intersight.
* Enables Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to deliver Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) benefits for on premise UCS Director installed inside customers Data Center.
* The entire UCS Director application, including Base Platform Pack, System Update Manager and infrastructure specific Connector Packs, can be automatically downloaded through Cisco Intersight.
Cisco Intersight enabled Connected TAC support :
* Enables proactive notifications and "one-click" diagnostics collection for UCS Director installation from Cisco Intersight platform.
* Provides a consistent means of supporting all Cisco UCS and HyperFlex systems through Cisco Intersight.
Self-service portal :
* Allows end users to order and deploy new infrastructure instances conforming to IT-prescribed policies and governance with approval processes, budget validation, and lifecycle management.
* With integrated service capabilities, delivers IaaS in shared service model (VPC Shared); users can provision virtual machines and applications from a pool of assigned resources by using predefined policies and workflow service requests.
* Extensible service platform creates new service offers with ability to catalog services.
* Offers metering of resource usage and consumption for showback reports that can be exported to thirdparty billing systems.
Broad heterogeneous support :
* Ability to automate a wide array of tasks and use cases across a broad variety of supported Cisco and thirdparty hardware and software data center components (refer to Table 2).
* Automated setup of VCE VxBlock, NetApp FlexPod, IBM VersaStack, and Pure Storage FlashStack converged infrastructure.
* Automation for Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS® ) servers, Cisco HyperFlex™ hyperconverged infrastructure, and Cisco Nexus® switches.
* Provisioning and management of physical and virtual switches and dynamic network technologies.
* Automated provisioning and management of storage virtual machines, filers, virtual filers, Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs), and volumes.
* Discovery, mapping, and monitoring of physical and logical data center topologies.
Optimized Multi-Node deployment for scaling :
* Multi-node configuration has been optimized to handle scale with one primary node and one database node.
Support for Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI® ) and ACI Anywhere :
* Workflows orchestrate the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) configuration and management tasks.
* Support for multitenancy, which enables policy-based and shared use of the infrastructure, and the ability to define contracts between different container tiers allow you to apply rules between tiers.
* Cisco ACI Multi-Site Controller Automation enables centralized automation, configuration, and management, including Policy-Based Redirect (PBR).
Developer functions :
* Native Java editor builds custom tasks with Cisco UCS Director Java libraries that enable orchestration operations.
* Native execution of commands or scripts is performed on Microsoft’s PowerShell agent.
* More than 400 predefined and certified code samples are available from a free community site.
