Cisco UCSM provides unified management of all hardware and software components for the Cisco UCS solution. UCSM also provides both GUI and CLI user interfaces. UCSM is embedded into Fabric Interconnects.

UCSM controls multiple UCS chassis. The maximum number of chassis that can be controlled by UCSM is 20, but the actual number of manageable chassis is dependent upon the model and the number of physical uplinks from each chassis' IOM or Fabric Extender module to FIs. UCSM provides unified visibility and management for servers, network, and storage resources. The core functions that UCSM provides are as follows:

• Identity and resource pools: UCSM provides identity and resource pools to abstract the compute-node identities for stateless servers, whereas traditional servers use the hardware's burned-in identities. These identities and resources include universally unique identifiers (UUIDs), media access controls (MACs), world-wide node (WWN) numbers, and IP pools for remote KVM.
• Policies: UCSM provides multiple policies that govern the behavior of system devices like service policy provides different configurations for UCS servers, including BIOS settings, firmware versions, Virtual Network Interface Cards (vNICs), virtual host bus adapters (vHBAs) policies, scrub policies, Quality of Service (QoS), and Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) policies, whereas global policy can be assigned to change the number of active links between FI and IO Module and so on. A service profile policy, once configured, can be assigned to any number of blade servers in order to provide the configuration baseline
• Templates: A template is an excellent feature of UCSM that assists in provisioning multiple physical servers, vNICs, and vHBAs, with similar hardware configuration through a single source. A template can be configured for each type of server in the environment, different vNICs, and vHBAs, as per the business requirement. Templates can be used to quickly create services profiles, vNICs, and vHBAs for the servers.
• Service profiles: A service profile is the principal feature of the UCS platform that enables stateless computing. It combines information and features abstracted from identity and resource pools, templates, and server policies. It is a software entity residing in UCSM, which has the specifications of a complete server when associated with a stateless physical hardware server. Service profiles radically improve server provisioning and troubleshooting.

UCSM provides the following benefits:

• Agility: With an appropriate initial configuration, UCSM facilitates the system administrator with rapid provisioning of any number of new chassis and blade servers using resource pools, policies, and templates to create service profiles.
• Flexibility: UCSM abstracts hardware resources using software configurations. A system administrator can quickly modify vNICs, vHBAs, and other resources using software configurations.
• Troubleshooting: Since UCS hardware is stateless, in case of catastrophic failures, servers can be replaced with all the existing identities and configurations without having to deal with lengthy configuration steps.

With Cisco UCS central software, UCS management can be extended centrally to thousands of servers in multiple UCS domains.