Cisco Cisco UCS Director 4.0 White Paper

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Application Infrastructure on Demand with Cisco UCS Director and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure
March 2015
•  A 
storage endpoint group hosts the storage devices that physical servers and 
virtual machines use to access their boot environments and application data. 
These storage devices are virtual devices supported by a storage virtual machine 
created by storage management systems such as NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP.
•  A 
host endpoint group contains the collection of physical servers and virtual 
machines allocated to the container.
Cisco ACI Deploys a Network Container
After a client makes a service catalog choice, Cisco UCS Director pushes the 
network profile that contains all the application component connectivity details to 
Cisco APIC. The network profile defines a virtual overlay network that includes the 
endpoint groups, the contracts for communication between them, and the services 
inserted between layers. Unlike in traditional networks, Cisco ACI does not obscure 
the underlying physical networks and devices and provides full visibility into the 
physical infrastructure that supports each VXLAN tunnel. It can identify any packet 
loss or out-of-bounds latency event and send that information to the real-time 
application health monitoring function. If any network event has a negative impact on 
application health, the network can be reconfigured dynamically to work around any 
hot spots. This reconfiguration is a simple change in the relationship between the 
virtual overlay network and the underlying leaf-and-spine architecture.
In the application profile example discussed so far, the network profile defines web, 
application, and database tiers with load-balancing and firewall appliances inserted. 
Figure 9 shows the creation of a network container. Using promise theory, every 
switch independently implements the network profile so that the fabric can operate 
autonomously, even if the APIC is not available. 
Management EPG
Secure Tenant Environment
Storage EPG
Data
Management
Storage Virtual
Machine
Host EPG
1
2
3
4
Figure 8. Tenant Onboarding Creates Management, Storage, and Host Endpoint Groups Within a 
Secure Tenant Environment