The Cisco UCS service profile provides the necessary platform for abstracting fundamental building blocks such as BIOS settings, firmware, storage, and networking settings for the servers. Combined with the simplified architecture and reduced infrastructure management, service profiles provide the stateless nature of Cisco UCS platforms. A service profile provides all identities and configurations to a UCS server necessary for the installation of the operating system, making the system unique on the network.

In the previous chapters, we learned about different components of UCS solutions including LAN configuration, SAN configuration, and identity and resource pools creation. These individual components provide all the resources and configurations to a blade server in the form of service profiles.

In this chapter, we'll explain the role of service profiles in the UCS platform. We'll look into creating various policies for the UCS server's configuration. We'll discuss the difference between standard and expert mode service profiles. Finally, we'll take a deep dive into creating service profiles as well as service profile templates and show the granular configuration options of each.

The list of topics that will be covered in the chapter are as follows:

• Overview of service profiles
• Different ways of creating a service profile
• Creating a service profile template
• Configuring the server BIOS policy
• Configuring the adapter policy
• Configuring the scrub policy
• Configuring the QoS policy
• Configuring the local disk policy
• Configuring IPMI
• Walking through the service profile creation-expert mode