Detailed in the video below is a joint PowerShell integration utilizing both Cisco UCS PowerTool and VMware PowerCLI. The goal of the integration is to show how easy it is in PowerShell to integrate across different functional areas within a virtualized infrastructure stack. By taking the power of managing UCS with UCS Powertool and coupling it with the power of managing VMware with PowerCLI an infrastructure administrator can fully automated configuration of a net-new cluster of hypervisors from bare metal in UCS to fully configured clusters in vSphere within minutes with very minimal script writing.
There was very minimal prework performed for both UCS and VMware in the environment being demoed in the video below. For UCS, the prework that was performed was racking, stacking, and cabling the physical UCS gear and performing an initial configuration of UCS manager. On the storage side, a 200 GB LUN was created and zoned to a range of 18 WWPN's as well. For VMware, vSphere and Auto-Deploy software were both installed and configured inside of a Windows 2008 R2 server that had DNS, DHCP, and TFTP installed and configured to best practices from VMware for Auto-Deploy.
From there, PowerShell utilizing the Cisco UCS PowerTool module and VMware PowerCLI snap-ins takes over!!!
Rolling Hypervisor and Server Firmware Upgrade of a Cluster - The third script will download the newest version of a ESXi hypervisor from VMware, create a new Auto-Deploy rule utilizing it for servers that are created from the Service Profile Template created in step one. Once the rules are updated, the script will loop through each hypervisor one by one in the cluster by first setting the hypervisor in maintenance which will trigger VM evacuation, shutting the hypervisor down, change the host firmware pack on the service profile which upgrades the firmware on the server, powering the server on which will cause the server to boot ESXi via Auto-Deploy and rejoin the cluster.
