UIM is a purpose-built service for Vblock Infrastructure Platforms that has centralized interaction with element managers to define available resource pools and then view their capacity through a single dashboard. It creates policy-based, automated, converged infrastructure provisioning templates that can be used on any Vblock platform.

A UIM service offering is a template that you can create in anticipation of the applications that will be deployed on your Vblock platform. Once created, the templates are placed into the UIM/P catalog, ready for provisioning and activation when needed. Service offerings contain all except components needed to have a complete foundational infrastructure, such as storage, compute, network, and operating system.

UIM/Provisioning provides administrators with a tool to provision the VCE Vblock system from one location. Compute, storage, and SAN components are discovered in UIM. The discovered resources can then be provisioned with UIM, making it a simplified approach to end-to-end provisioning.

A base configuration is required for provisioning to occur. As an example, the UCS must be configured with a number of policies, Fabric Interconnect connectivity, and so on. Storage must have the RAID groups and/or pools. The following diagram shows the overall architecture of UIM and its component connectivity diagram:

UIM is designed to discover the Vblock components, attempting to simplify the Vblock system into a single entity, create infrastructure services for automated provisioning of the Vblock system, and integrate the provisioned ESXi clusters with vCenter.