VMware released the vCenter Orchestrator Plug-in for the Cisco UCS Manager

With this release vCenter Orchestrator is extending his reach in the automation of the cloud infrastructure with managing the physical infrastructure supporting it.

For those that do not know yet it is installed as part of vCenter (starting with version 4.0) and usable at no additional cost. It is the only Orchestrator platform supporting full functionality of vCenter and vCloud Director. With the release of the Cisco UCS Manager the end to end provisioning of physical resources - virtual infrastructure - multi-tenant cloud Organizations, virtual Datacenters, vApps is now possible.

The UCS manager plug in is coming with standard workflows allowing to:

  • Use power operations on blades.
  • Create, update network (vNICs and VLANs)
  • Create update storage (vHBAs, vSAN)
  • Create, update Boot, local disk, fibre channel, serial over LAN policies
  • Manage UCS manager service prodfiles
  • Associate service profiles with policies and blades
  • Manage MAC, UUID, WWNN, WWPN pools

And allowing to combine all these functionalities and more for building your own workflows.

For having participated in helping large corporations and service providers to build such elastic cloud solutions over the last five years I can testify that these were very large and very custom development projects mobilizing several men years of design, development and maintenance. The effort can now be dramatically reduced and as such being handled broadly by smaller companies using vCenter Orchestrator in combination of vSphere, vCloud Director and for the first time a partner product, our great partner Cisco.

Find the official release announcement with the links to the download, release notes, user's guide on the newly created VMware vCenter Orchestrator blog.

And I forgot to mention, this plug-in is free !