UCS Platform Emulator Install

As far as management interfaces go, the UCS management interface is pretty good, however there is a steeper learning curve compared to other management interfaces. If you don't get a chance to do some hands on training before working with the system (and even if you do), then you should have a look at the Cisco UCS Platform Emulator (UCSPE) before you work on a live system.

The UCS Platform Emulator provides the management interface for the UCS without the hardware backend. This can be useful if you want to work on a design, test a concept or get some familiarity with the system before actually having to work with a live system.

 

 

To run the emulator, you'll need to make sure you have some things ready first:

1. VMware environment - You can use workstation, player or fusion to run the emulator. ESX is supported, but requires conversion of the virtual machine. My testing was done on VMware workstation. Player can be downloaded free at http://www.vmware.com/go/player
2. System Requirements - Cisco requirements for the emulator are 8GB disk space, 1GB memory and 1.8 GHz CPU. The unpacked and powered on system took just under 4 GB of disk space.
3. Firefox or Chrome - The 'Hardware Designer' requires Firefox or Chrome to display properly. This is specific to the platform emulator as the manager interface runs entirely through the java interface and is all you will see on a live system.
4. Java Runtime Environment 1.6 - This is required to run the UCS Manager interface
5. UCSPE Image - The platform emulator can be downloaded from the cisco developer site (http://developer.cisco.com/web/unifiedcomputing/ucsemulatordownload) and comes as a virtual machine in a 7-zip archive. The latest version at the time of writing is 2.0, which is the version I am using for testing. Unzip this and you will have the UCSPE VM and a readme file.

Once you have extracted the UCSPE image locally, open the 'UCSPE.vmx' file through your chosen VMware product and power on the virtual machine.

The virtual machine itself runs a copy of CentOS Linux with the UCS Manager code running on top of it. If your VMware installation is setup up correctly, the virtual machine should get an address via DHCP during startup, which you can use to connect to via a web browser. The address that the VM is using can be seen in the VMware console window (below.)

If you want to change the IP address that the emulator is using before connecting via a web browser, you can log in on the console using 'config' and 'config' to change the network settings.

Using Firefox or Chrome, connect to the address of the emulator and if all is working correctly, you should see something similar to the following.

Before you launch the UCS manager interface, you'll need to check a couple of settings:

1. Number of Uplinks - How many uplinks from the fabric interconnects?
2. Database Persistence - Do you want the configuration to persist when you restart the VM?
3. High Availability - Do you want dual fabric or a single fabric interconnect?
4. Addressing - You can change the addressing here if you didn't do it earlier

Once you've made your changes, restart the UCS Manager through the interface for the changes to take effect.

Lastly, before you start the UCS Manager interface, have a look through the 'Hardware Catalog' and 'Start-up Inventory'. The Hardware Catalog contains details on the UCS hardware available and the Startup Inventory can be used to change the hardware available through the UCS Manager. You can leave these at the defaults as there is enough there to get started with the interface.

Now we can start the UCS Manager interface. Go back to 'UCS Manager', 'UCS Manager Home' and select 'Launch UCS Manager'. This will start a download of a JNLP (Java Network Launch Protocol) file which runs the UCS Manager interface. When prompted, login as 'config' and 'config'.

You should now see the UCS Manager interface (below) which you can use to get some familiarity with the UCS Manager interface or test configurations.

If you're not sure where to go from here, have a look at the UCS Configuration Guides from the Cisco site for ideas on what can be configured.

Links:
UCS Platform Emulator Guide - http://developer.cisco.com/web/unifiedcomputing/docs
UCS Configuration Guides - http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10281/products_installation_and_configuration_guides_list.html