AMA - Introduction to Cisco Intersight Managed Mode and UCS X-Series

[Brooke Hammer]

Ask Me Anything Event

Welcome to the Cisco Community Ask Me Anything conversation. Are you already familiar with the new Cisco UCS solutions and the Cisco Intersight™ infrastructure management platform? The Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service is an infrastructure lifecycle management solution delivered as a service or connected via a private virtual appliance. It helps IT operations teams gain visibility, control, and automation for their compute, storage, and network infrastructure, wherever it is, from one place. The Intersight Infrastructure Service is a core module of the Cisco Intersight IT Operations Platform that provides a single pane of glass for managing and automating your global infrastructure throughout its lifecycle. With Intersight Infrastructure Service, you get all the benefits of SaaS delivery and complete infrastructure lifecycle management, distributed workloads across data centers, remote sites, branch offices, and edge environments in one place.

In addition, the Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System (UCS X-Series) provides blade server capabilities, offering compute density, storage capacity, and expandability in a single system. This is a modular system managed from the cloud via Cisco Intersight. It has a future-proof and adaptable modular design that meets the needs of modern applications and improves operational efficiency, agility, and scale.

Discover the new Cisco UCS X-Series, which together with the Cisco Intersight management platform allows you to deploy, configure, update, automate, and scale your environment through a cloud operating model in ways that were not possible before, resulting in an infrastructure ready for today's and tomorrow's hybrid world challenges.

Click on the 2 great resources below to get you started and join us August 28th- Sept 8th to ask any questions!

Meet the UN/BOX: Cisco UCS-X Series Modular System with Intersight 

Cisco UCS X-Series Quick Start Guide

Note: Please post your question as a comment below no later than September 8, 2023.

Post your question below by clicking "Reply"

(Answers will be processed depending on the availability of the experts)
Don't forget to thank the expert by giving it a helpful vote!

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Our experts

Luis Uribe  is an escalation Engineer specialized in Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) and Intersight products within the Cisco TAC team. He has been awarded as a TAC Hero for his several contributions. He participated as a speaker in the last edition of Cisco Connect Latam and continually collaborates in initiatives to improve the product and create content for the Cisco UCS portfolio.

Ricardo Martinez is a Technical Leader for the Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) and Intersight product portfolio at Cisco TAC. Within his role, he constantly collaborates with product development teams, aiming at the constant improvement of the Cisco UCS portfolio. He has experience in implementing comprehensive Data Center solutions with clients in the public, financial and private sectors. He has participated as a speaker at Cisco Live in the 2019 edition.

For more information, visit the Data Center discussion forums . If you have questions or are experiencing technical problems with any of the Cisco products, post your question, request information or use the Cisco Community before opening a case with the TAC.

[luuribe]

Hi Marimutoo,

If I understood you correctly you asked for the advantages of an IMM UCS-X Domain.

Here are some of the differentiators of Cisco UCS-X deployments with IMM:

1. Ease of Deployment & Management with Cisco Intersight (IMM is available for Intersight SaaS or the On-Premises delivery Connected Virtual Appliance or Private Virtual Appliance).
2. Modular Design: The Midplane-free design is intended to avoid cabling limitations for introducing new hardware.
3. Third-Party Integration: Integration with 3rd party storage vendors and hypervisors.
4. Future Ready: The Cisco UCS X-Series delivers resources in a cloud-based fashion to scale for modern workloads.
5. A new approach on PCIe Nodes that allows you to add up to four GPUs to compute nodes along with the X-Fabric Modules.
6. Automation and Orchestration: Intersight enables automation and orchestration of various tasks and workflows, reducing manual effort and increasing operational efficiency.

In the features, we can highlight the following:

1. OS Installation: You can install the OS on multiple servers with just one task, using the required OS configuration.
2. Firmware upgrades with images downloaded from the cloud.
3. Proactive RMAs for specific hardware.
4. Integration with TAC: Cisco Support can remotely collect tech support information for endpoints and attend pro-active cases.
5. Security advisories to report when endpoints are affected by vulnerabilities.
6. Hardware Compatibility Checks: This feature shows if a server is compatible in terms of hardware, firmware, and drivers.
7. Simultaneous update of the Operating System and firmware upgrades with a single firmware image, thanks to the integration with Hardware Support Manager (HSM) and VMware Lifecycle Manager (vLCM).
8. Domain Profiles: These are configuration templates that define the desired settings and policies for a group of IMM Domains.

[gjaimes]

Great new product and info, thanks for sharing.

[dennis_farrell]

Nice information, Thanks for sharing.

[lauvtoronto]

Thank you for providing the information, will be good knowledge to have.

[Hermanus Janse van Vuuren]

good knowledge thanks for sharing

[Noviyanto]

Nica sharing

[AnwarNugraha]

Thank you for the insights

[bo.miller]

Thanks for the info; very informative!

[aztabiliran]

UCS X series is very much helpful in solutions and configuration thanks you very much!

[s.morillo]

Great UN/BOX paper. I really enjoy it

[kamalkumar3552]

Good stuff to know about . Easy and fast to digest article . 

[cabrera.vasquez.cesar]

A great introductory about Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System (UCS X-Series)

[cabrera.vasquez.cesar]

A great introductory read about Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System (UCS X-Series)

[Riaan van Niekerk]

According to the Transition Tool, 

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/Intersight/IMM-Transition-Tool/User-Guide-3-0/b_cisco_intersight_managed_mode_user_guide_3_0/m_overview_imm_tt_3.html

"If your UCSM domain has any HyperFlex cluster deployed, do not migrate to IMM. HyperFlex servers are not currently supported in IMM."

Does that mean that you should keep the Hyperflex domain in Manager-Managed Mode, with domain settings either managed locally or by UCS Central? 

[RedNectar]

Hi @Riaan van Niekerk ,

Correct - HyperFlex clusters cannot be managed in IMM yet. After these things take time, and it's only been... what 5 years? Oh sorry - 6 years - since Cisco started project Starship (which evolved into Intersight) which co-incidently coincides with the acquisition of Springpath (the company that developed HyperFlex).

Surely you must realise you have to give Cisco a reasonable amount of time to get these kind of things done!

But all is NOT lost - you don't HAVE to use IMM to manage UCS-X any more (as you once did), so it SHOULD be possible to have a HyperFlex cluster AND a UCS-X chassis connected to the same pair of Fabric Interconnects, just so long as you forget about Intersight and use good ol' UCS Manager to manage them.

Of course, if Cisco get their at together and make it possible to manage HyperFlex connected Fabric Interconnects in Intersight Managed Mode (I'd say give them another 5 or 6 years should do it) then you'd be able to fully manage both UCS-X and HyperFlex from Intersight - and have a shared Fabric Interconnect Cluster.