Thanks for the follow up! Yeah I was told by someone else at Cisco to use the "g-" to differentiate the names. I use that as the naming standard for anything in Central now. I agree that Central has become a much more powerful tool than when it started out. I have 13 domains globally with 4 more coming in the next couple of months. The UCS Central PowerTool has helped tremendously in scripting the creation of LAN Connectivity Policies and SP Templates. (Which we create a lot of due to the needs of segregation between the different server roles and their associated templates.) ... View more

Brad, Great article! So far the switch to Central has been fairly simple. The only big hurdle I've run into is switching the UCS domains over to Global VLANs. Do you have any strategies to replace local VLANs with the global versions? For example: I have a local service profile with a vnic using VLAN 100 and I want to create a global service profile for a new host and apply it to an additional blade on the same UCS domain. The GSP's vnic will be configured for VLAN 100 as well but association with the blade will fail due to the VLAN overlapping. I have found the only way around this is to pull VLAN 100 out of the local vnic template and then delete local VLAN 100. I then try to associate the GSP to the blade again and this time it will create a global VLAN 100 on the local UCS domain. At that point I can then add the global VLAN 100 back to the local vnic template so the local SP can communicate again. The issue I'm running into is that this requires an interruption in data flow since the VLAN has to be deleted and the global version copied down. This becomes a bigger hurdle when all ESX hosts share the same admin/mgmt VLAN. All ESX hosts will have to take a full interruption in mgmt traffic while the VLAN is deleted. Hopefully I'm over thinking this and there is a simpler way to go about this. Thanks Ben ... View more