At Cisco Live 2016 in Vegas I presented a new session, BRKPCA-2020, titled "Automate your Data Center Today with UCS Director". In this session we discuss and dive deep into the key knowledge needed to tackle sophisticated Infrastructure Automation tasks in the topics of:
Understanding the UCS Director Workflow Engine
- Workflow Designer Walkthrough
- Service Requests and Rollback
- Understanding Inputs and Outputs
- Leveraging Workflow Tasks
- Using Processing Logic in Workflows
- Intro to Scripting and Custom Tasks
After reviewing the topics, we put them to use in a Use Case that I've worked through with many customers in labs, POCs, and production setups. This use case was building a multi-tier application environment (or project) that leverages Cisco ACI for network segmentation, VMware for VM deployments, Cisco UCS for bare metal servers, and UCS Director as the Automation engine behind it all. This demo and Use Case discussion covers the technical bits, but more importantly discusses a strategy for planning out infrastructure automation, and includes the actual white boarding and planning docs created for this demonstration.
Attached to this post are the Workflows and Custom Tasks used to create the use case, the Slides walking through of the Use Case, and the planning docs that were created during the actual building of the use case.
You can find the demo video on YouTube at UCS Director Automation Demo - Cisco Live 2016 BRKPCA-2020 - YouTube