UCS Central uses the same model-based architecture framework as UCS Manager by extending APIs for global automation among multiple UCS domains. It simplifies UCS management by standardization, aggregation, global policy enforcement, and global ID consistency. Each UCS domain will get registered with UCS Central to provide centralized policy-driven automation. These UCS domains can be configured as a UCS domain group in UCS Central and multiple UCS domain groups can be created in it:

It offers two modes for deployment: standalone and clustered modes. The cluster mode is required where you don't have high availability provided by the hypervisor. You can deploy two virtual machines in the cluster mode with a shared disk. The standalone mode can be deployed with high availability offered by the hypervisors.

It is software that can be installed as a virtual machine appliance either through an OVA file or ISO image. It supports all the major hypervisors such as VMware ESXi, RedHat KVM, and Microsoft Hyper-V.

The following is the list of supported hypervisors on which UCS Central 1.5 software can be installed. It can be downloaded from https://software.cisco.com/:

• VMWare ESXi 5/6
• KVM hypervisor on RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.5 and 7.2
• Microsoft Hyper-V server 2012 R2/2016

Scalability of UCS Central doesn't depends upon the number of UCS domain registrations; instead, it depends upon the total number of blade servers that are getting managed through it. The underlying hardware requirements for UCS Central should be a minimum of four vCPUs, 16 GB memory, and 80 GB space. For medium to large UCS domain deployments, it is recommended to monitor the performance of UCS Central VM and increase the resources such as vCPU and memory according to your requirements. It is always recommended that UCS Central should be installed on a high-speed data store for better performance.