UCS Director Baremetal Agent is another appliance that provides the physical Baremetal provisioning for all major operating systems; it is also called BMA. It includes the following services to automate the provisioning process for servers through the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE):

• Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP)
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
• Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP)

The UCSD BMA appliance needs to be integrated with the UCS Director appliance for server provisioning. There are two NICs available on BMA: one communicates on a management network with UCS Director and the second NIC is used for server provisioning.

UCS Director Scalability can be scaled from single node to multi-node mode. Multi-node mode is deployed for workload sharing the services across multiple services nodes but it doesn't provide high availability as this relies on the hypervisor high availability feature. Multi-node can be deployed where virtual machines are more than 5,000.

The UCS Director Dashboard tab can provide a single console to monitor all the trends, graphs, and bars for all the physical and virtual infrastructure components, as shown in the following screenshot:

It is a model-based orchestrator that allows the IT admin to customize and automate components with an easy-to-use workflow UI designer. It provides a comprehensive task library, with more than 2,000 tasks for compute, network, storage, and virtualization domain elements to create the workflow for automating the IT process. It provides a drag and drop mechanism to simply call the existing tasks, as shown in the following screenshot:

End users can check the status of the requested services, where admin can check status and detailed log information for any errors in the workflows, as shown in the following screenshot. It provides a real-time log mechanism to easily troubleshoot any kind of errors and a rollback mechanism to simply go back to a previous state:

UCS Director CloudSense Analytics provides visibility into the utilization of resources and performance metrics in real time. It provides a wide variety of reports and assessments for physical and virtual infrastructures. The reports can be generated in PDF or HTML format. The following example shows the inventory report of UCS servers in a data center: