The Cisco UCS platform can be automated and managed with PowerShell. The GUI is very flexible but like most GUI’s is very manual. As your environment grows and expands so does your workload so automation becomes even more important. Cisco UCS is now over two years old and I have used this platform since very early in its existence. I was excited to see PowerShell support for UCS. I have included some links and basic information here that can help get you started.
The Cisco Blog is a great place to start with automating your UCS environment
The initial release of the UCSM toolkit included over 75 cmdlets, including support for comman tasks in UCSM.
- Stateful connection management to multiple UCSM systems
- Service Profile Management (create/modify/delete/association)
- Log viewing/management
- Server Power Management
- Full Inventory Management
- Raw XML input/output capability
It also includes standard PowerShell functionality:
- Fully object based architecture
- Command pipelining support
- Standard inline help support (get-help syntax)
- Standardized PowerShell verb usage
PowerShell is a great way to manage and automate and even report from various platforms including UCS.
Links:
UCSM PowerShell Toolkit Download
http://developer.cisco.com/web/unifiedcomputing/pshell-download
Automating Cisco UCS with Windows Powershell 101
http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/automating-cisco-ucs-management-with-windows-powershell/
