Standard Catalog

The standard catalog is the basic offering for end-user virtual machine ordering. Most of the projects that run in today’s data centers include virtual machines. Your end users will likely be using this type of catalog the most. The standard catalog provides an easy-to-use front end to order machines for your end users. It can be customized based on templates and policies you configure as well, such as who can see certain catalogs.

You can create new standard catalogs from the UCS Director GUI by selecting Policies ➢ Catalogs. When you create a standard catalog, you’ll choose the source image or the ISO for the VM to be built. UCS Director supports many different types of private clouds and VMs within the standard offering.

As of this writing, the standard catalog supports the following hypervisors:

• VMware vSphere
• Microsoft SCVMM for Hyper-V
• Red Hat KVM

UCS Director supports all of the operating systems compatible with the preceding list. Different templates are used for each vendor, and they are not interchangeable without conversion. I’ll walk you through how to add a standard catalog and explain the relevance of each item and how it relates to the overall service catalog.

To get started, select Policies ➢ Catalogs in the GUI. Then follow these steps:

1. Choose the Catalog tab and click Add (+).
2. On this screen, you choose the type of catalog to create. Here, choose Standard and hit Submit.
3. You’ll see the Add Catalog dialog with several options to fill in, as shown in Figure 18.1.

These are the fields you’ll see:

• Catalog Name: Here you can give the catalog a name that your end users will see. Choose wisely; once you pick the name, you can’t modify it. You’ll have to make a new catalog to change the name.
• Catalog Description: This is a description for your catalog.
• Catalog Type: Notice that this option is grayed out; you already picked this option when you selected Standard.
• Catalog Icon: You can choose from a list of predefined icons to associate with the catalog item. This is what users will see when they go to click a catalog icon.
• Support Contact Email Address: This is the e-mail address of support contacts.
• Selected Groups: Use the Select button to select groups from the Select Items dialog box. The selected groups can use the catalog to provision new VMs.
• Publish To End Users: This is selected by default. If for some reason you don’t want your end users to view this catalog, you can deselect this box. Then no one but the administrator can see this item for ordering.
• Cloud Name: Choose the cloud with the image for VM provisioning.
• Image: Choose the image type such as Windows, Linux, or any other templates your setup uses.
• Windows License Pool: This option only appears for Windows images for dealing with license pools and Windows activations and is not shown in the figure.

4. Click Next; you’ll arrive at the Application Details pane, as shown in Figure 18.2.

• On the Application Details pane, you will see these options:

• Category: Figure 18.3 shows an example of the dialog that appears when you click Select. This is where you can apply different VDC policies to VMs within the same VDC. If this option isn’t used, UCS Director will assume that the VM is generic.
• Override: Select this box if you desire the end user to override the selected category while provisioning the VM.
• Specify OS/Specify Other OS: This is for setting the type of OS installed on the VM when it is provisioned.
• Specify Applications/Specify Other Applications: This displays a checkbox of specific applications from the catalog that can be installed during provisioning, such as Apache, MySQL, or others.
• Application Code: This is for a code used in the VM name. An example might be W2K8 for Windows Server 2008. You can then use this name in templates and policies.

5. Click Next to go to the User Credentials pane, as shown in Figure 18.4.

• There are only three options here: Do Not Share, Share After Password Reset, and Share Template Credentials. Choose one of the latter two if you don’t have another service to authenticate the users, such as LDAP. If you already have a service to authenticate users, you could choose the Do Not Share option because their accounts could already be set up to log in. When shared, the password will be available through a VM action called Access VM Credentials in the USCD portal.

6. Click Next to go to the Customization pane, as shown in Figure 18.5.

• Automatic Guest Customization: This lets UCS Director use the customization features of the hypervisor to configure DNS, network, and guest OS properties. If you don’t select this, customization will have to be configured later.
• Post Provisioning Custom Actions: Select this box, and new workflows show up that you can choose after the VM is provisioned. This allows you to run certain tasks after the VM is built. The workflow drop-down list appears only if you select this option.
• Virtual Storage Catalog: Select the Enable box to select storage entries from the virtual storage catalog.
• Cost Computation: This area offers a quick way to apply some lease options and charge options to VMs. This is an easy option to choose if you haven’t used the more robust chargeback features covered in Chapter 16. The chargeback features previously covered offer far more control than this Lease option, but you can use either.
• VM Life Cycle Configuration: These options allow you to define a lease time or prevent users from editing lease times or provisioning VMs later.
• Click Next to go to the final VM Access pane, as shown in Figure 18.6.

The options here let you choose what type of access UCS Director can provide to users for newly created VMs. You can use Web Access, Remote Desktop, or the VM Remote Console service provided by vSphere.

The final page after clicking Next shows you a summary of all the options chosen. Here you can go back and edit them or click Submit to build your standard catalog.

Advanced Catalog

The advanced catalog is a bit of a misnomer in the way it’s named. You would think that it simply adds on to the standard catalog with advanced features. In reality, the advanced catalog is easier to deploy than the standard catalog. A standard catalog is used to create a new VM with a limited set of options. There are post-creation jobs that can be run under application details, but the options end there. What if you wanted to do something outside the bounds of just a VM turn up? You could use the built-in integration with ACI, for example, to turn up VMs, add them to an endpoint group, and edit firewall rules all within an orderable catalog item. The possibilities are endless, especially when creating your own custom workflows.

Let’s look at the front end of the advanced catalog, as shown in Figure 18.7.

We won’t go through all the fields here because they’re similar to the previous fields for standard catalogs. However, notice that there are very few options. There are only three panes in this dialog, and one of them is for the summary. This is because you’ve already built the workflow or are using a predefined one. Clicking Next on the Basic Information pane brings you to the next page where you can choose your workflow by clicking Select, as shown in Figure 18.8. UCS Director includes many predefined workflows for you to get started. Yours may be different than shown here depending on the version of UCS Director that you have. You can also create your own workflow, as discussed.

You can see the power of advanced workflows by creating orderable items for your end users that follow a detailed list of orchestration instructions. The standard catalog can spin up VMs, but the advanced catalog can do almost anything you’ve programmed the workflows and orchestration to do. Figure 18.9 shows the final summary screen.

Service Container Catalog

The service container catalog deals with the three-tiered container Cisco Virtual Application Cloud Segmentation (VACS) that we’ve discussed in previous chapters. The service container catalog allows you to combine physical and virtual offerings.

Select Policies ➢ Catalog again in the GUI, and you’ll see the Add Catalog dialog for a service container catalog, as shown in Figure 18.10. The example here is the typical grouping of web, application, and database servers.

Here we’ve chosen a basic three-tier template called CCNA_Cloud. This spins up simple web, database, and application server containers. These templates can be configured by selecting Policies ➢ Application Containers in the GUI, and you can read more about them in Chapter 15. These containers have security and load balancing policies and can be managed as a single resource. Using this catalog lets your end users order custom containers that you’ve defined as templates. The customizations are entirely up to you.

Bare-Metal Catalog

The exam doesn’t go into detail on the bare-metal catalog, but it’s good to have an understanding of the differences. As you would suspect by the name, the bare-metal catalog is for provisioning a bare-metal UCS server. To create a bare-metal workflow, you are required to perform the following set of tasks:

• Create the bare-metal provisioning wrapper.
• Select a UCS server.
• Create a UCS server profile from a template.
• Associate the UCS service profile.
• Set up a PXE boot with BMA selection.
• Power on the UCS server.
• Monitor the PXE boot.
• Modify the UCS service profile boot policy.
• Power on the UCS server.
• Assign the UCS server to group.

VDI Catalog

Previous versions of UCS Director also had a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) catalog. Depending on the version you’re using, yours may not. You can use the VDI catalog to deploy virtual desktop environments managed via Citrix. It is not within the scope of the exam, so it is not covered here.