In this chapter, we first acquired an understanding of the service profile and looked into various service profile creation options. We learned that the expert mode service profile creation provides advanced configuration features, and also learned that creating service profile templates facilitates rapid server provisioning. Then we looked into various policies that can be configured and, later on, assigned them to blade servers through service profiles. We looked at policies such as BIOS, Adapter, Scrub, and QoS. Finally, we did a walkthrough of service profile creation using the expert mode, and utilized different UCS policies and settings to create a service profile that can be associated to a physical blade server, to provide the server with all configurations necessary for proper operation. We utilized the knowledge gained throughout the previous chapters and created a service profile that can provide the server with all the necessary characteristics.

In the next chapter, we will be looking into some common management tasks for managing and monitoring components, and advanced tasks such as role-based access control, authentication using external LDAP/AD, and multitenant environment considerations.