In this chapter, we learned about the miscellaneous and most common tasks along with some advanced management tasks you need to perform with UCS Manager. We started looking at how to obtain and configure extra port licenses for Fabric Interconnects. We learned that UCS Fabric Interconnects are designed for continuous operation and hence do not have a power button. It is however possible to reboot Fabric Interconnect, but only from CLI. We learned about a corner case requirement in a DR situation for how to control blade power usage. We learned about looking into the status messages and turning on/off the locator LEDs available on blades, blade chassis, and Fabric Interconnects. We covered what the default logging setting is and how we can configure a remote syslog server. We configured the Call Home feature which can be used to inform/alert UCS management teams and Cisco TAC.

Finally, we learned about how we can configure organizational structure and RBAC in UCS. We configured an external authentication using the LDAP configuration for Microsoft Active Directory and also mapped users to UCS locales. Combining user authentication, organization structure, and locales, it is possible to configure permissions for multitenant environments. UCS organizational design and the RBAC configuration provide the required security for authentication, authorization, and accountability to UCS in large-scale or multitenant UCS deployments where delegation of accesses with user nonrepudiation is required.

In the next chapter, we will learn about the integration of Cisco UCS within virtualized environments, mostly with VMware vSphere, which is the dominant hypervisor deployed in production environments, and we will also look at the Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch.