Cisco Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack is backed by two trusted technology innovators, Cisco and Microsoft. In partnership, we are committed  to deliver: Customer success through joint development, service and support Access to an extensive Cisco- and Microsoft-certified solution partner channel A range of Cisco and Microsoft advanced services to help plan, architect, and manage your hybrid cloud deployments Access to thousands of Azure-based applications Use the Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite Cloud Management package to automate deployment and management of applications across 20 hybrid cloud environments, including Microsoft Azure Stack and Microsoft Azure. AAG document: http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center/integrated-system-microsoft-azure-stack/at-a-glance-c4… White Paper: Microsoft Azure Stack Technical Preview on Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers - Cisco Try your Azure deployment on Cisco UCS and provide feedback as comments below. ... View more

This video blog gives a brief overview on the latest management pack built for SCOM 2016. Features the following sections;   Installing the unified management pack Adding UCS Domains Viewing UCS Health and Faults UCS Inventory UCS Performance Metrics ... View more

Cisco and Microsoft continue their ongoing enhancements to the integrations of their operations and automation tools to help IT organizations achieve greater efficiencies. Cisco UCS™ was designed to help optimize IT operations. We created a broad partner ecosystem from the very beginning to leverage the advantages of our programmable infrastructure and unified APIs. The integrations we have developed with Microsoft and more than 15 other ISVs help organizations customize and extend their existing IT investments in: IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) Monitoring and analysis Orchestration and automation Configuration, deployment, and compliance DevOps and continuous delivery Virtualization and storage management Wide Range of Microsoft Integrations The UCS management integrations with Microsoft include a variety of different tools. Here’s a quick summary: Cisco UCS Management Pack Suite for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM): Provides visibility into the health, performance, and availability of Cisco UCS servers managed by Cisco UCS Manager, UCS Central Software, and Integrated Management Controller (IMC). Cisco UCS PowerTool Suite: A set of Microsoft Windows PowerShell modules for Cisco UCS Manager, IMC, and UCS Central Software. UCS Director Integration with Microsoft SCVMM: Enables you to perform basic System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) actions on a VM, and it supports a variety of network models. Integration Pack for Microsoft System Center Orchestrator (SCO) can be used to automate the configuration, monitoring, and deployment of Cisco UCS resources. Read this, if you’d like to learn more. Seeing the Benefits I wanted to demonstrate some of the benefits of these integrations, so I developed a video to help you get started with the UCS Management Pack Suite for SCOM. The demo provides an introduction to the following: Unified installer (UCS Manager, Central and IMC) Configuring the management pack (adding UCS Domains) Health and alerts Hierarchy / tree view Performance metrics Ongoing Development with Microsoft We’ve made several recent updates to the integrations to support the latest releases and provide ongoing improvements. Management Pack: Support for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2016 and other enhancements. Click here to download the latest version. PowerTool Suite: Support for the latest releases of UCS Manager, Central and IMC plus new cmdlets to interact with the Cisco UCS hardware and software compatibility list. You can download the latest version here. For the latest on the Cisco UCS management integrations with Microsoft and other partners go to the UCS Communities site. ... View more

Google hangout event: https://plus.google.com/u/1/b/112306339297997566930/events/chnm9acn1u1e6k3dbr0c9f293s0 Join Cisco for a discussion on the features and capabilities of the new Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC) Supervisor version 2.0. This new release is incremental to v1.1, which provides centralized monitoring, inventory and basic management functions for select standalone C-Series (M3/M4) and E-Series Servers (M1/M2). In this session we will cover the background, architecture, use cases and features of this new offering, which includes: Summary of what is new in v2.0 North Bound API Scheduler Non-interactive Diagnostics Smart Call Home Embedded Update Manager In this session we will not only demonstrate the new capabilities in this management platform, but also provide pointers to additional information and resources. When:   Thursday, Aug 4, 2016 from 8-9AM PST Moderator: Kevin Egan, Manager, Technical Marketing Engineer, Cisco Guests: Karthik Jayaraman, Product Manager, Cisco Nithya Natesan, Technical Marketing Engineer, Cisco Vivek Indrayan, Lead Development Engineer, Cisco Links Relevant to this session: Cisco UCS Communities: http://communities.cisco.com/ucs Cisco Standalone C-Series IMC 2.0 Announcement: https://communities.cisco.com/community/technology/datacenter/compute-and-storage/ucs_management/blog/2016/04/10/cisco-imc-supervisor-20-release-announcement Cisco UCS Management (Blog): http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/cisco-ucs-management/ Cisco UCS C-Series Servers: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/index.html Cisco UCS C-Series Servers: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-e-series-servers/index.html    To learn more about Cisco IMC Supervisor: IMC Supervisor 2.0 Release Notes: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/Cisco-IMC-Sup/rel-notes/2-0/b_Cisco_IMC_Supervisor_Release_notes_20.html IMC Supervisor 2.0 Installation Guide: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/Cisco-IMC-Sup/install_guide/2-0/b_Cisco_IMC_Supervisor_Install_Guide_20.pdf IMC Supervisor 2.0 Management Guide: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/Cisco-IMC-Sup/mgmt-guide/2-0/b_Cisco_IMC_Supervisor_Mgmt_Guide_2_0.pdf ... View more

If you have Cisco UCS and VMware ESXi in your data center environment, and you have not taken a look at this management pack yet, you should! Here's why; Significant Functionality in a Single Pack The VMware and Cisco development teams have worked closely together to enhance the functionality in this release of the management pack. This plug-in provides correlation between the Cisco UCS™ servers, storage and networking as well as Cisco HyperFlex™ hyperconverged infrastructure physical resources and the VMWare virtual infrastructure components. It features several capabilities including UCS inventory, monitoring of health and alerts, viewing correlations and I/O power, temperature and performance metrics from within vRealize Operations. There are multiple dashboards that help you visualize your environment, including the mapping of physical infrastructure to virtual infrastructure resources. Health and performance monitoring are provided for network traffic, faults, temperature and many other metrics. I wanted to highlight some of the capabilities for users, so I developed a new demo video that summarizes some of the many functions in the latest version of the Cisco UCS Management Pack for VMware vRealize. Click here to watch the video. Customers provided us with input, and we’ve implemented better arrangement of stats counters for network management and added support for new metrics: Error counters for DCE interfaces, fabric port and port channels Exhaust temperature for chassis fan modules This new release is another example of how Cisco and VMware continue to cooperate and work together to enhance our solutions. I think you’ll find there are some real improvements to make your daily operational activities easier, and there’s more to come as we continue to enhance the management pack. Here is my blog on cisco.com - http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/working-together-ucs-management-and-vmware-vrealize-operations Details on UCS management pack for vROps - Cisco UCS Management Pack for VMware vRealize Operations ... View more

Link to YouTube recording: Join Cisco for a discussion on the features and capabilities of the new Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC) Supervisor version 1.1. This new release was developed on top of v1.0, which provides centralized monitoring, inventory and basic management functions for select standalone C-Series (M3/M4) and E-Series Servers (M1/M2). In this session we will cover the background, architecture, use cases and use of this new offering which includes the following capabilities: Summary of what is new in v1.1 Policy Based Configuration – Hardware Policies and Profiles Email Alerting enhancements Firmware Management In this session we will not only demonstrate the new capabilities in this management platform, but also provide pointers to additional information and resources. Event link: UCS Tech Talk - "Meet the Engineer" - What's New in IMC Supervisor v1.1 - Google+ When:   Thursday, November 19, 2015 from 8-9AM PST Moderator: Kevin Egan, Technical Marketing Manager, Cisco Guests: Jeff Foster, Product Manager, Cisco Nithya Natesan, Technical Marketing Engineer, Cisco Arun Srinivasan, Engineering Manager, Cisco Links Relevant to this session: Cisco UCS Communities: http://communities.cisco.com/ucs Cisco Standalone C-Series IMC 2.0 Announcement: https://communities.cisco.com/community/technology/datacenter/compute-and-storage/ucs_management/blog/2015/09/08/cisco-imc-supervisor-11-release-announcement Cisco UCS Management (Blog): http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/cisco-ucs-management/ Cisco UCS C-Series Servers: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/index.html Cisco UCS C-Series Servers: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/ucs-e-series-servers/index.html    To learn more about Cisco IMC Supervisor v1.1: IMC Supervisor 1.1 Release Notes: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/Cisco-IMC-Sup/rel-notes/1-1/Cisco_IMC_Sup_RelNotes.html IMC Supervisor 1.1 Installation Guide: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/Cisco-IMC-Sup/install_guide/1-1/b_Cisco_IMC_Sup_Installation_Guide_11.pdf IMC Supervisor 1.1 Management Guide: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/Cisco-IMC-Sup/mgmt-guide/1-1/b_Cisco_IMC_Supervisor_Mgmt_Guide_1_1.pdf ... View more

Did you know? It takes over 500 screens to install just the prerequisites and SQL server for a complete System Center Installation. Here is a prerequisite list from Microsoft; Microsoft's PowerShell Deployment Toolkit (PDT) solves exactly this. It installs all of the dependencies and brings up System Center in a fully automated fashion. But one thing that I constantly struggled with, was finding good documentation on how-to use this tool online. Hence my blog... I will summarize all the steps I took to get this tool to install the System Center components in my lab environment. Requirements Download PDT scripts - Grab from TechNet PowerShell Deployment Toolkit. Download and Install Windows Platform Installer Download and Install 7-zip or any equivalent (un)zip software Step 1: Plan your Data Center environment Some things to think about;     Do you already have an AD, DNS etc that you would like to leverage for this setup? Would you need VMs to be created from scratch? Also keep in mind about user accounts, their security principals etc.. Step 2: Editing Variable.xml Change the values of "SourcePath" and "Download" to reflect where you have downloaded PDT and wherever you want all the dependency files to be installed. Misc: You might want to change the Domain name (Contoso) and default passwords that comes with this script, unless you want to name yours after Microsoft's fictional company name. =) Step 3: Download dependencies (Downloader.ps1) After editing the Variable.xml, run the Downloader.ps1 script. The script specifies a start time and starts to grab ALL of the files required for your deployment. Note that there are few files you might have to download manually and keep it handy; Windows Server 2012 R2 Windows Server 2012 (Only if System Center Service Manager is required) System Center R2 Virtual Machine Manager System Center R2 Orchestrator System Center R2 Operations Manager Once you run the Downloader.ps1 script, a screen like the one below appears; Lots of files will get downloaded and this could take couple of hours (or more!), so grab a bite while the script grabs all the bits. =) Step 4: Create VMs If you decide to create VMs from scratch in your environment, modify the Variable.xml to reflect the location of WindowsServer2012 R2 vhd file in your local machine. Also modify the XML file to point to your Hyper-v machine ("localhost" in my example). All of the VMs will be created on this Hyper-v environment. VMCreator.ps1 creates all of the VMs (including AD / DNS), creates a virtual internal network (CorpNet1 from the above example) and waits for all of the VM creation to complete. This script also turns on the AD machine first, waits for the other VMs to come up, runs a registry service from inside of the AD VM and registers all of the created VMs to its AD in an automated fashion. Step 5: Install all the System Center components Final step is to run the Installer script, which installs all of the System Center components inside the respective VMs. This script also does a final check for all of the dependencies before the actual installation. So if you need to just verify for the dependencies, use -DeploymentOnly option while running the script. Once the script gets past verifying dependencies stage, it takes about 3 hours-ish to install and bring up the System Center components. Note that Microsoft color codes go like this - Yellow is warning, Green is success, White is in progress, Red is error. See a sample of successful installation below; If you got to this point and everything looked green in your console, System Center is installed successfully in your environment. You should be celebrating! =) Also at this point, you are only one step away from managing and monitoring your UCS hardware from inside of your newly created System Center Environment. Grab the UCS / IMC Management Packs (Free!) for System Center from the UCSIntegrations subspace to do so... To summarize, here's what I really like about PDT; Installs all of the System Center dependencies and completely abstract it from the end user. So we can get to be dumb (only slightly!) =) The VMCreator script helps with all of the VM creations from scratch. You can get to start with a clean slate! Great tool for building demo / lab environments from scratch. Esp. when you dont have Microsoft 101 components like AD, MSSQL, appropriate user accounts, security principals etc. When it worked, it installed ALL of the System Center components in under 3 hours for me! Extensible - can be modified for one's own deployment scenario. Re-runnable. Best feature ever! Believe me, you'd want to validate and re-validate a bunch of times until all of the dependencies are installed and validated. It does not break whatever was already working. Cons; No rock solid documentation from Microsoft around this (Yet!). You are kind of on your own way. No innate support for SCCM Installation (Yet!). I installed this one manually. So go ahead and give this a shot.. Good luck! =) ... View more

UCS Management Pack 2.0(3) for VMWare vRealize Operations Manager 6.3/6.4/6.5/6.6/6.7/7.0   This version of the management pack supports VMware vRealize Operations Manager 6.3/6.4/6.5/6.6/6.7 and addresses few bugs along with new features as: Support for manual discovery of the resources Support for creating adapter instances using proxy server New Resource kinds, metrics and properties related to S3X60 chassis and severs.   Download link: https://software.cisco.com/download/release.html?i=!y&mdfid=286305108&softwareid=286305820&release=2.0(3)   Release Notes: Release Notes for Cisco UCS Management Pack, Release 2.x For VMware vRealize Operations Manager - Cisco   UCS Management Pack 2.0(2) for VMWare vRealize Operations Manager 6.2/6.3/6.4   This version of the management pack supports VMware vRealize Operations Manager 6.2/6.3/6.4 and addresses few bugs.   Download link: https://software.cisco.com/download/release.html?i=!y&mdfid=286305108&softwareid=286305820&release=2.0(2)   Release Notes: Release Notes for Cisco UCS Management Pack, Release 2.x For VMware vRealize Operations Manager - Cisco   UCS Management Pack 2.0(1) for VMWare vRealize Operations Manager 6.0/6.1   Happy to announce that UCS Management Pack 2.0 for vRealize Operations 6.0/6.1 is on Cisco.com.    This pack contains UCS Manager Adapter which helps in monitoring the UCS domain physical infrastructure within vRealize Operations. It provides correlation between the UCS physical and the VMWare virtual infrastructure components and features several capabilities including UCS inventory, monitoring UCS health and alerts, viewing correlations and I/O power, temperature performance metrics from within vRealize Operations.   Download Link: https://software.cisco.com/download/release.html?mdfid=286305108&flowid=79283&softwareid=286305820&release=2.0(1)&relind=AVAILABLE&rellifecycle=&reltype=latest   Release Notes: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/msft_tools/vCOps/release_notes/UCSM_vROps_RN_2x.html   User Guide: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/msft_tools/vCOps/User_guide/b_UCS_mgmt_pack_vROps_UG.html   External customers - For any issues, contact Cisco TAC (highly recommended for quick resolution) or add a discussion to the Cisco Developed Integrations sub-space on Cisco UCS Communities. Send your suggestions for new features to ucs-vmw-plugins@cisco.com.   Internal (Cisco) customers and employees - Contact us at ucs-vcops@cisco.com for support questions and ucs-vmw-plugins@cisco.com for roadmap questions, new feature requests and feedback. -------- UCSM Management Pack 1.1(1) for VMWare vCenter Operations Manager 5.8.x   New features in this release: All of UCSM Management Pack 1.0.1 features plus the following; Support for several new resource kinds - Fabric Interconnect, Server adaptor, server motherboard, fan, psu etc. Metrics and statistics for ports, port channels, adaptors, DCE interfaces, vHBAs, vNICs and iSCSI vNICs   Supported Cisco UCS Manager versions - 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 Support VMware vCenter Operations Manager versions - 5.8 (5.8.2 and above)   Software Download: https://software.cisco.com/download/release.html?mdfid=286282669&flowid=72562&softwareid=286283872&release=1.1.1&relind=AVAILABLE&rellifecycle=&reltype=latest   Release Notes: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/msft_tools/vCOps/release_notes/UCSM_mngt_pack_vCOps_release_notes.html   User Guide: Cisco UCS Manager Adapter User Guide, Release 1.x for VMware vCenter Operations Manager - Cisco ... View more