Cisco UCS for Microsoft Management: Turbocharging PowerShell
At the recent Microsoft Management Summit trade show (MMS 2012) in Las Vegas, Cisco Systems showcased its extensive data center management capabilities for its UCS server and Nexus switching platforms. Both have strong integrations into Microsoft’s ecosystem of Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 and PowerShell. This is an important investment area for Cisco, as data center infrastructure management is a true Cisco differentiator and affords channel partners opportunities to drive efficient, effective and profitable deployments of UCS and Nexus.
Cisco UCS Manager, our native UCS component manager, and Cisco PowerTool, our Microsoft PowerShell Command Line Interface (CLI) front end, are the key solution components here, followed by our integration modules for System Center Operations Manager and System Center Orchestrator.
With these solutions, channel partners can with confidence drive highly automated and higher-quality deployments of UCS for their Microsoft-based clients. Be it a Microsoft private cloud deployment or Exchange 2010 or SQL Server migrations, these management components help to automate and execute provisioning and configuration tasks as well as to drive more efficient ongoing data center monitoring.
As an example proof point of utilization of these management solutions, this case study from a Microsoft data center in Redmond, Wash., describes the speed of a server refresh project that took just a day or so instead of the expected several days. Also, please feel free to watch the Manage Cisco UCS with System Center 2012 and PowerShell session from MMS 2012, during which Cisco Product Manager Chakri Avala covers integration of our UCS XML API with management tools from Microsoft to expose detailed Cisco UCS hardware inventory, monitoring, alerting and automating.
To continue to learn more on Cisco UCS and Cisco’s capabilities for Microsoft environments such as Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V/Private Cloud, Exchange, SQL Server, VDI and SharePoint, please visit www.cisco.com/go/microsoft.
Rex Backman is global marketing manager of Microsoft Solutions at Cisco. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of The VAR Guy’s annual platinum sponsorship. Read all of Cisco’s guest blogs here.
