my cheat sheet on UCS API

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1 Cisco Compute APIs

Goal is to orchestrate everything in the datacenter,

  • Compute
  • Storage
  • Network
  • Access
  • Observability (configuring metrics collection on all elements)
  • other cloud services (autoscaling groups, clustering and failover)

1.1 Cisco UCS Managment APIs

  • Cisco Intersight
  • Cisco UCSM
  • Cisco Central
  • Cisco IMC

1.2 User Integration APIs

  • Ruby
  • Powershell
  • Python

1.2.1 UCS Manager PowerTool Suite

a library of Microsoft PowerShell commandlets, cmdlets for UCSM

  1. Sessions
  2. Methods
  3. Queries and Filters
  4. Configurations and Transactions
  5. Event Subscription

2 UCS Manager

  • Cloud bare-metal layer for Cisco UCS. and hyperconverge3d product lines of compute, storage and network layer.
  • Lets operator provision, configure, observer and manage life cycle of pools of networked compute and storage hardware within a singel UCS domain
  • UCS Central extends the ability to manage larger domains, of up to 10,000 compute nodes.

2.1 UCS Manager API

An XML API for UCS. The API includes:

  • Cisco PowerTool for PowerShell
  • Python SDK
  • Many 3rd party integrations

ucsm.png

Figure 1: UCS Manager API

UCS Central offers some advantages when operating multiple UCSM locations

  • unified control plane for all the elements in the system, including centralized logs for compute, network, and storage
  • single source of truth accessible to tools via API
  • Centralizes global policies, service profiles, inventory, ID pools, and templates for up to 10,000 servers.

3 Cisco Intersight (saas platform)

a rest api. cloud-hosted management of cisco ucs and cisco hyperflex.

  • your apic clusters still are on site, but you manage them from the cloud.
  • simplifies systems mgt across datacenter, robo, and edge
  • tightly integrated with cisco tac

3.1 cisco intersight and openapi spec.

intersight includes an api that suports openapi specification. (what was formerly known as "swagger". it is a definition format to describe restful apis. users get an interoperable rest api with tools that automate the generation of intersight api documentation, api schemas, and sdks. this intersight api includes fully functional python sdk and powershell sdks.

3.2 cisco intersight api:

  • accepts and returns messages encapsulated in json
  • uses http over tls as transport
  • api is automatically updated when new features are deployed. (because it is cloud based)
  • supports get, post, patch, delete methods.

all the data is presented in the cisco intersight information model. these are most of what you can manage with intersight:

  • cisco ucs servers
  • server components such as dimms, cpus, graphics processing units (gpus), storage controllers, and cisco imc
  • cisco ucs fabric interconnects
  • firmware inventory
  • cisco hyperflex nodes and hyperflex clusters
  • virtual machines
  • vlans and virtual storage area networks (vsans)
  • users, roles, and privileges

for more details check out intersight.com/apidocs

4 UCS Director

4.1 Home