Cisco and Microsoft continue their ongoing enhancements to the integrations of their operations and automation tools to help IT organizations achieve greater efficiencies.

Guest Blogger: Nithya Natesan, Technical Marketing Engineer

Cisco UCS? was designed to help optimize IT operations. We created a broad partner ecosystem from the very beginning to leverage the advantages of our programmable infrastructure and unified APIs. The integrations we have developed with Microsoft and more than 15 other ISVs help organizations customize and extend their existing IT investments in:

• IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM)
• Monitoring and analysis
• Orchestration and automation
• Configuration, deployment, and compliance
• DevOps and continuous delivery
• Virtualization and storage management

Wide Range of Microsoft Integrations

The UCS management integrations with Microsoft include a variety of different tools. Here's a quick summary:

Cisco UCS Management Pack Suite for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM): Provides visibility into the health, performance, and availability of Cisco UCS servers managed by Cisco UCS Manager, UCS Central Software, and Integrated Management Controller (IMC).

Cisco UCS PowerTool Suite: A set of Microsoft Windows PowerShell modules for Cisco UCS Manager, IMC, and UCS Central Software.

UCS Director Integration with Microsoft SCVMM: Enables you to perform basic System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) actions on a VM, and it supports a variety of network models.

Integration Pack for Microsoft System Center Orchestrator (SCO) can be used to automate the configuration, monitoring, and deployment of Cisco UCS resources.

Read this, if you'd like to learn more.

Seeing the Benefits

I wanted to demonstrate some of the benefits of these integrations, so I developed a video to help you get started with the UCS Management Pack Suite for SCOM. The demo provides an introduction to the following:

• Unified installer (UCS Manager, Central and IMC)
• Configuring the management pack (adding UCS Domains)
• Health and alerts
• Hierarchy / tree view
• Performance metrics

 Ongoing Development with Microsoft

We've made several recent updates to the integrations to support the latest releases and provide ongoing improvements.

• Management Pack: Support for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2016 and other enhancements. Click here to download the latest version.
• PowerTool Suite: Support for the latest releases of UCS Manager, Central and IMC plus new cmdlets to interact with the Cisco UCS hardware and software compatibility list. You can download the latest version here.

For the latest on the Cisco UCS management integrations with Microsoft and other partners go to the UCS Communities site.