UCS Manager Plugin 0.9.2 (beta) for VMware vCenter

Posted on 2 mins read

From the official blurb..

Cisco UCS vCenter Plug-in is an extension for the vSphere Web Client v5.1 or higher. It enables virtualization administrators to view, manage and monitor various aspects of Cisco UCS physical infrastructure. The result is a single pane of glass for Virtual Center users to get both physical and virtual infrastructure information for a given hypervisor.

The packages can be downloaded from here.

The Cisco UCS Plug-in can be divided into 2 major components, ucs-vcplugin service and ucs-vcplugin UI. ucs-vcplugin services use UCS Java SDK to interact with UCS domains over XML API interface and the ucs-vcplugin UI is the flex based extension to the web client, which communicates with the ucs-vcplugin services to populate the UI.

Plugin architecture

You will need to download 2 files (the plugin actually does not need to be downloaded – and can be automatically downloaded during the plugin registration)

files

In the RegisterVCPlugin-092.zip file you will find an executable - RegisterVcPlugin_092.exe. Run the executable.

You will need to provide some information. If you have already downloaded the ucs-vcplugin-0.9.2.zip file and have made it available to through a web server locally (like I did), then you can provide your own URL.

Enter info

You should use an https:// url and not http – otherwise you will need to make a configuration change in your vSphere Web client configuration on the vCenter server.

use https://

After pressing submit and a minute later (if all the information was correct) you should see the following:

success

After logging into your vSphere Web Client (and remember this is a web client plugin only) you should see something similar to this.

UCS plugin

To manage the Fabric Interconnect’s, register the UCS with the correct information

register UCS

success

You can now see a new addition to your Web client

image

The plugin will automatically recognize your ESXi hosts.

ESXi Hosts

And here you can find a plethora of information.

UCS info

The profile applied, which blade this is (Chassis 3, Blade 8)

You can open a KVM directly to the Blade

KVM

You see the firmware as well.

firmware

All in all – I find this to be a good integration. It is a read-only interface – which is a good (or bad) thing – depends on your view of the world.

Completely free – but it is officially a beta – so this is not supported and should be deployed at your own risk.