Cisco Cisco UCS Director 4.0 White Paper
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Application Infrastructure on Demand with Cisco UCS Director and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure
March 2015
Cisco UCS Director and Cisco ACI Have a Common Understanding of EPG
Characteristics
After Cisco ACI has created the network container, it informs Cisco UCS Director
and the virtualization manager about the network characteristics of each EPG so that
they can discover the new networks, and so that Cisco UCS Director can deploy
computing and storage resources in the network container.
Characteristics
After Cisco ACI has created the network container, it informs Cisco UCS Director
and the virtualization manager about the network characteristics of each EPG so that
they can discover the new networks, and so that Cisco UCS Director can deploy
computing and storage resources in the network container.
Cisco UCS Director needs to know the endpoint characteristics for two reasons:
• It needs to configure port profiles so that it can direct Cisco UCS to configure
• It needs to configure port profiles so that it can direct Cisco UCS to configure
physical servers with NIC configurations that Cisco ACI recognizes as belonging
to one of the newly created EPGs.
to one of the newly created EPGs.
• It needs to configure port profiles to match port groups in virtualization managers
such as VMware vSphere so that the virtualization manager and Cisco UCS can
coordinate network connectivity to Cisco ACI.
coordinate network connectivity to Cisco ACI.
Virtualization managers such as VMware vSphere need to know endpoint
characteristics so that they can create port groups that have configurations allowing
their virtual machines to become members of the newly defined endpoint groups.
characteristics so that they can create port groups that have configurations allowing
their virtual machines to become members of the newly defined endpoint groups.
Cisco UCS Director Deploys Virtual Machines
Using information from the application profile, Cisco UCS Director deploys the virtual
machines dictated by the application profile into the network container. In the case in
the example described so far, it will deploy four web servers into the web EPG, and
two application servers into the app EPG.
Using information from the application profile, Cisco UCS Director deploys the virtual
machines dictated by the application profile into the network container. In the case in
the example described so far, it will deploy four web servers into the web EPG, and
two application servers into the app EPG.
Because of the coordination described in the previous step, Cisco UCS Director
understands the virtual networks created by the virtualization manager and uses that
knowledge to interface with the EPG in Cisco ACI Cisco UCS Director coordinates
the creation of virtual machines and vNICs with port groups configured to match
EPG requirements. This coordination allows Cisco ACI to automatically recognize the
new virtual machine as belonging to a specific EPG. It creates the virtual machines
understands the virtual networks created by the virtualization manager and uses that
knowledge to interface with the EPG in Cisco ACI Cisco UCS Director coordinates
the creation of virtual machines and vNICs with port groups configured to match
EPG requirements. This coordination allows Cisco ACI to automatically recognize the
new virtual machine as belonging to a specific EPG. It creates the virtual machines
Cisco UCS Director
Application Catalog
Application
Profile
Controllers
Computing
Network
Storage
Load Balancer
Firewall
Web
Web
Web
Web
Web
App
APP
APP
DB
DB
DB
Network Container With
Layer 4 Through 7 Services
Network
APIC
Web
App
DB
Layer 4-7 Services
Stateful Firewall
Connection to
Connection to
Application
Web EPG
App EPG
DB Tier
Storage
Storage
Load Balancer
Packet Filtering
Figure 9. The First Step in Automatic Application Infrastructure Deployment Is Establishing a
Network Container
Network Container