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Cisco UCS Director Delivers Infrastructure as a ServiceA Comparison with HPE OneView

December 2015

White Paper

© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public information.

What You Will LearnThis document describes how the depth and breadth of Cisco UCS® Director’s capabilities uniquely enable the delivery of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), in contrast to the limited hardware provisioning capabilities of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) OneView.


ContentsInfrastructure as a Service Enables Business Speed and Agility ....................... 3

Cisco UCS Director Delivers IaaS..................................................................... 4

Orchestration and Automation ......................................................................... 4

Broad Orchestration Capabilities ........................................................................... 4

Extensive Automation Capabilities ......................................................................... 6

Automating Big Data Deployment .................................................................... 8

No Big Data Support with HPE OneView ............................................................... 8

Private and Hybrid Cloud Deployments ............................................................ 8

No Support for Private and Hybrid Cloud Deployment from HPE OneView ........... 9

Heterogeneous Infrastructure Support ............................................................. 9

HPE OneView Supports a Limited Portfolio ........................................................... 10

Self-Service Provisioning ................................................................................. 11

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Integration ............................................. 11

Open XML API and REST API for Integration with Other Management Platforms .. 12

Fuel Your Business with Accelerated and Agile IT ............................................ 13

For More Information ....................................................................................... 13

Cisco UCS Director Delivers Infrastructure as a ServiceDecember 2015

Cisco UCS Director Delivers Infrastructure as a Service

White PaperDecember 2015


Infrastructure as a Service Enables Business Speed and AgilityIaaS helps you create a business that can quickly adjust to changing market forces. It helps you to build an IT organization that can:

• Remain flexible to quickly align business and IT objectives

• Optimize budget allocation and investments by simplifying and automating core IT processes

• Quickly deliver and demonstrate business value without compromising security and while managing risk in compliance with laws and regulations

• Help transform the business by unveiling new revenue streams, creating new business processes and new business models

• Assume the role of broker of IT services when appropriate, recognizing the benefits of adopting best-in-class capabilities to remain competitive even if gaining these benefits requires you to outsource portions of the IT value chain

The Gartner IT Glossary defines IaaS as follows:

“Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities are owned and hosted by a service provider and offered to customers on-demand. Customers are able to self-provision this infrastructure, using a Web-based graphical user interface that serves as an IT operations management console for the overall environment. API access to the infrastructure may also be offered as an option.”

Rather than outsourcing these capabilities, many organizations are implementing them in their own data centers to gain the flexibility and agility of self-service, on-demand provisioning of both physical and virtual infrastructure. Cisco UCS Director

http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/infrastructure-as-a-service-iaas/



delivers exactly this capability. HPE OneView claims to deliver IaaS, but falls short in the following ways:

• Provides limited automation capabilities with no self-service

• Offers limited support or guidance for specific application stacks

• Primarily supports only one hardware vendor (HPE) when organizations want to automate the entire data center

• Creates islands of automation because HPE OneView management domains do not federate or centralize management with other OneView appliances or the Synergy Composer

• Supports limited integration with operations tools even within all HPE products

As this document demonstrates, Cisco UCS Director is much better suited than OneView to help you deliver IaaS to your clients.

Cisco UCS Director Delivers IaaSCisco UCS Director was designed for IaaS. It automates IT processes, providing a single point for self-service from which you can automate and orchestrate your IT infrastructure, including computing, networking, and storage, with physical and virtual resources treated equally.

HPE OneView is an excellent tool for deploying many of HPE’s hardware solutions. However, OneView is really an infrastructure management tool, not an IaaS delivery system, despite the marketing claims. Table 1 summarizes some of the critical IaaS capabilities of Cisco UCS Director and the limitations of OneView.

HPE has announced the availability of HPE Synergy in the second quarter 2016. OneView is embedded in the Synergy Composer appliance. HPE has described Synergy as a “private bare-metal cloud.” Although this description sounds appealing, Synergy Composer supports only the HPE hardware managed under the domains in the Synergy platform. If you are already using OneView today to manage your HPE BladeSystem, ProLiant DL servers, or ConvergedSystem products, you will have to license Synergy Composer separately. In addition, Synergy Composer will not work in conjunction with your existing OneView software, because there is no way to federate the separate islands of management. Synergy Composer and OneView do not provide the essential IaaS capabilities that Cisco UCS Director provides with one license.

Orchestration and AutomationCisco UCS Director offers stronger orchestration and automation capabilities than OneView.

Broad Orchestration CapabilitiesCisco UCS Director comes with a large task library with more than 1500 automated tasks and more than 100 preconfigured workflows. The task library provides low-level, or atomic, actions that you can quickly assemble to create higher-level workflows that deploy, configure, and manage your infrastructure. You can use workflows immediately or publish them in an infrastructure catalog to be used by system administrators or clients for on-demand infrastructure provisioning.



Figure 1. Cisco UCS Configuration Options

Function Capability Cisco UCS Director 5.4 HPE OneView 2.0

Orchestration and automation

Orchestration workflows More than 100 preconfigured workflows

Not available

Automation task library More than 1500 automated tasks

Not available

Automated cloud deployment

Yes Not available

Automated big data deployment

Yes; Hadoop Not available

Self-service provisioning

Processing of service requests

Yes Not available

Dynamic resource allocation

Yes Not available

Lifecycle setup and notification

Yes Not available

Budget validation and approvals

Yes Not available

Heterogeneous provisioning and management (in addition to vendor hardware)

Servers Cisco, HPE, Dell, and IBM

No; HPE only

Storage Cisco, F5, Brocade, and Citrix

Brocade Fibre Channel switches (monitoring only Cisco Nexus® 6001 and 6004 top-of-rack [ToR] switches)

Converged infrastructure

EMC, IBM, HDS, NetApp, Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, and StorMagic

No; HPE 3PAR only

Hyperconverged infrastructure

NetApp FlexPod, SmartStack, VCE Vblock, HDS Unified Compute, and VersaStack

No; HPE CS700, CA700, and CS300 with HPE 3PAR storage only

Extensibility to other tools and controller platforms

Software-defined networking (SDN)

Cisco Intercloud Fabric™,Cisco® Virtual Application Cloud Segmentation (VACS) Services, and Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)

Not supported

APIs Representational state transfer (REST) and XML

REST only

Table 1. Comparison of Cisco UCS Director and HPE OneView IaaS Capabilities



Workflows can be assigned to an entire organization or to specific groups based on your organizational structure. User authentication and authorization information can be imported from the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) service.

Tasks and workflows automate the configuration of all hardware infrastructure layers, including computing, networking, and storage (Figure 1). You can provision bare-metal servers, add virtualization layers, and add your chosen operating systems. You can also provision virtual and object-based storage configurations. Cisco UCS Director lets you test workflows, and it is designed so that workflows are completed successfully or not at all. The drag-and-drop workflow designer tool eliminates the need for service engagements or the need to bring together multiproduct solutions or third-party adapters.

Extensive Automation CapabilitiesAfter workflows are created by your subject-matter experts, the policies implemented with these workflows automate the entire application lifecycle, including resource allocation, provisioning, monitoring, and management. This automation greatly reduces the amount of time required before you start gaining value from your deployments.

Cisco UCS Director maintains a faithful representation of every component and its relationship to other components. At installation, Cisco UCS Director conducts a discovery of physical and logical infrastructure components that is updated every 15 minutes and recorded into a model stored on a virtual appliance. The customer-configurable discovery process records changes, moves, and additions of new infrastructure. Any workflow that you can perform on the physical or virtual infrastructure can be first tested against the model to validate the configuration, helping eliminate potential disruption from human error. When processes are established, consistency and compliance is essentially assured, and configuration drift is nonexistent.

StorageAdministrator

ServerAdministrator

NetworkAdministrator

2 Physical and VirtualInfrastructure IsProvisioned

Policies Are Used toCreate Template 3 System Is Ready for Use4Subject-Matter Experts

De�ne Policies1

Server Policy

Storage Policy

Network Policy

Virtualization Policy

Application Policy

VirtualInfrastructureAdministrator

Network Con�guration

StorageCon�guration

VirtualInfrastructure Con�guration

Server NameUUID, MAC Address, WWN, Boot Infor-mation, LAN and SANCon�guration, andFirmware Policy

Server NameUUID, MAC Address, WWN, Boot Infor-mation, LAN and SAN Con�guration,Firmware Policy,SAN Zoning,Create and MAP LUN

Figure 1. Cisco UCS Director Delivers Comprehensive Orchestration Capabilities



Although OneView automates deployment of some of HPE’s product portfolio, Cisco UCS Director comes with a toolbox of predefined tasks that you can combine to create workflows that not only direct Cisco UCS to apply Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS) service profiles, but also to provision other third-party servers in your data center, access-layer switching infrastructure, storage configuration, and operating system and hypervisor configuration. With this approach, your entire infrastructure is provisioned according to the policies that your subject-matter experts define. And after you have created these workflows, you can use them over and over to automate deployments, saving both time and money (Figure 2).

Limited Orchestration and Automation with HPE Software

You need to augment OneView with HPE Operations Orchestration software to accomplish the same orchestration and automation tasks that are integral capabilities in Cisco UCS Director. HPE OneView manages only a subset of HPE’s hardware products—not the entire product portfolio. HPE’s orchestration uses templates that can be applied to hardware components, instead of workflows that allow the entire deployment and management processes to be automated. HPE software does not orchestrate the establishment of virtualization layers, leaving that process as a manual task. Also, OneView does not support installation of operating systems on your platform. For that, you must install HPE Server Automation—yet another software bundle that you need to purchase, install, configure, and manage.

The HPE Image Streamer option will be available when the new HPE Synergy 12000 system ships in 2QCY16. This option works with Synergy Composer to configure private-cloud-ready images for VMware ESXi and Docker-enabled Linux images on Synergy systems only. HPE, in its “HPE Synergy Composer QuickSpecs,” makes these claims:

VMs Compute Virtualized and Bare-Metal

Secure Cloud Container

Policy-DrivenProvisioning

On-DemandAutomated Delivery

DomainManagers

Single Pane of Glass

End-to-End Automation and

Lifecycle ManagementUCS Director

OS andVirtual

Machines

Compute and Hypervisor

Compute

Network and Services

Network

Storage

Network Storage

AppOS

AppOS

BareMetalVMVM

TenantB

TenantC

TenantA

B CA

Figure 2. Cisco UCS Director Delivers Comprehensive Infrastructure Automation and Management

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/server-automation-software/



“Image Streamer provides a highly-available appliance pair that can capture/edit/store images, create stateless boot images, and deploy or update compute modules quickly. Profiles are combined with golden images and personalities for stateless operation. Stateless boot images are stored in an image repository for fast implementation onto compute hardware at any time. These stateless capabilities can deploy and/or update multiple compute nodes with extreme speed.”

Image Streamer works in conjunction with Composer, but there is no indication it works with other HPE OneView appliances. As a result, the Synergy management domain becomes another island of automation that is isolated in the data center.

Automating Big Data DeploymentAs you consider big data solutions to meet your growing data and business needs, operational challenges can emerge. Despite the compelling business advantages, Hadoop clusters can be difficult, complex, and time consuming to deploy. Moreover, with the volume of your data increasing rapidly, you need to find efficient ways to consistently deploy and scale your cluster.

Cisco UCS Director greatly simplifies this process with a single-touch solution that automates deployment of Hadoop on Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data, a predefined converged-infrastructure solution from Cisco created and tested specifically to meet the needs of big data environments. It also provides a single management pane across both physical infrastructure and Hadoop software. All infrastructure components are handled automatically, with little need for user input. Through this approach, configuration of physical computing, internal storage, and networking infrastructure is integrated with the deployment of operating systems, Java packages, and Hadoop along with the provisioning of Hadoop services. Cisco UCS Director is integrated with industry-leading Hadoop distributions from Cloudera, MapR, and Hortonworks. It complements and communicates with Hadoop managers, providing a systemwide perspective that enables administrators to correlate Hadoop activity with network and computing activity on individual Hadoop nodes.

No Big Data Support with HPE OneViewOneView does not help you deploy or manage HPE’s big data solutions. It also does not support HPE’s primary big data platforms: HPE ConvergedSystem 500 (CS500), ConvergedSystem 900 (CS900), and CS300 for Microsoft Analytics Platform (CS300 for APS). HPE offers software that is licensed separately and is completely decoupled from all its other management software.

Private and Hybrid Cloud DeploymentsToday, most IT organizations are expected to support private and hybrid clouds. Cisco UCS Director helps enable you to create a private, multitenant IaaS cloud. When Cisco UCS Director is used as part of the Cisco ONE™ Enterprise Cloud Suite, Cisco Prime™ Service Catalog and Cisco Intercloud Fabric transparently extend private cloud workloads, on demand, to public or provider-hosted cloud



environments. To protect your business governance policies and meet service-level agreements (SLAs), Cisco Intercloud Fabric delivers highly secure and flexible workload placement across any hypervisor or service provider, extending to the public cloud the same network security and access control policies that you have in your private cloud.

The result is secure and elastic cloud capacity, lower costs, and fast access to resources. With private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, you have the flexibility to source IT services based on your business needs, IT requirements, and desired consumption models. With Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite, your organization becomes a broker of services, with the capability to oversee workload movement, application management, security, and compliance across private and public cloud domains and deliver the desired business scalability, cost-effective benefits, and innovation.

No Support for Private and Hybrid Cloud Deployment from HPE OneViewOneView does not support private or hybrid cloud deployments. If you choose to support a private or hybrid cloud with HPE software, you have two choices: OpenStack or Microsoft Azure. With that limitation, you have several more software products to license and deploy.

HPE CloudSystem Foundation is the HPE product for basic private cloud IaaS. CloudSystem Foundation is based on Helion OpenStack. OneView is not included in HPE CloudSystem Foundation. You must upgrade to HPE CloudSystem Enterprise, which includes HPE Cloud Service Automation, to have even loose integration with OneView.

Heterogeneous Infrastructure SupportA management solution that works with only a limited portion of one vendor’s products in your data center has many restrictions. An IaaS and orchestration solution needs to work with most, if not all, the infrastructure in your data center. Cisco UCS Director has broad support for both Cisco and third-party hardware, including:

• Industry-leading hardware and virtualization vendors

• Servers: HP, IBM (Lenovo), and Dell

• Storage: EMC, Hitachi, IBM, NetApp, and Nimble Storage

• Operating systems and virtualization: VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and Red Hat

• Different platforms

• Cisco UCS Integrated infrastructure, also known as converged infrastructure, which is a packaged solution consisting of server, networking, and shared storage as a preintegrated stack, including:

- FlexPod: Cisco UCS and NetApp FAS storage

- VCE Vblock: Cisco UCS and EMC storage

- SmartStack: Cisco UCS and Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash storage

- VersaStack: Cisco UCS and IBM storage

- Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP): Cisco UCS and Hitachi storage



• Hyperconverged infrastructure, which consists of tightly integrated computing, networking, and storage resources that are primarily software defined:

- SimpliVity: Cisco UCS with SimpliVity OmniStack

- Springpath: Cisco UCS with Springpath Data Platform

• The entire Cisco UCS server portfolio

• Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers

• Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers

• Cisco UCS M-Series Modular Servers (Cisco Composable Infrastructure)

• Cisco UCS C3260 Rack Server (Cisco Composable Infrastructure)

• Cisco UCS Mini

• Cisco networking products

• Cisco IOS® Software switches, Cisco Nexus switches, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™), and Cisco MDS 9000 Family multilayer switches

Not only does Cisco UCS Director support the automated provisioning and management of these platforms—it also integrates at a deep level to help ensure proper and consistent provisioning, security, and management of your resources. When Cisco UCS Director is deployed, it creates an inventory of every component in its sphere of control. When new components are added, they are automatically placed in a resource pool.

HPE OneView Supports a Limited PortfolioYou should not confuse HPE OneView with HP OpenView, the monitoring product that HPE acquired. OpenView was designed to be open, as the name implies. It supports HPE as well as a wide variety of third-party servers and network devices. OneView focuses on managing a limited environment. It provides support for only a portion of HPE’s server, storage, and converged infrastructure portfolio. If you want to configure third-party infrastructure, you need to use other HPE products, such as HPE Server Automation Virtual Appliance (SAVA). OneView also makes a distinction between the products and models that it can manage and those that it can only monitor. Cisco UCS Director has no need to make this type of distinction, because it can manage and monitor all the platforms it supports.

According to documentation that has been released, Synergy Composer supports only a very limited portfolio: the Synergy platform and external HPE storage arrays. As reported by Forrester, a Synergy management domain can include up to 20 chassis, and the Synergy resource domain can include external storage arrays (Forrester blog, HPE Transforms Infrastructure Management with Synergy Composable Infrastructure Announcement, December 1, 2015).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_OpenView

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_OpenView

http://blogs.forrester.com/richard_fichera/15-12-01-hpe_transforms_infrastructure_management_with_synergy_composable_infrastructure_announcement

http://blogs.forrester.com/richard_fichera/15-12-01-hpe_transforms_infrastructure_management_with_synergy_composable_infrastructure_announcement



Self-Service ProvisioningCisco UCS Director provides a self-service portal (Figure 3). This critical component allows clients to actually request infrastructure as a service in both private and hybrid cloud deployments, as well as to request infrastructure as bare-metal servers, virtual machines, services, and applications. Administrators can establish an orchestration workflow as a catalog item in the service portal. Users can request infrastructure through the portal and can customize the request to fit their needs. Cisco UCS Director can add approval and budget validation steps to the ordering process if needed. The provisioning workflow includes the following stages:

• Initiation: Initiate the service request.

• Resource allocation: Allocate the resources required for physical or virtual machine, network, and storage provisioning.

• Approval: The request is sent to an appropriate authority for approval, depending on whether it is part of the workflow.

• Provision: The infrastructure is provisioned.

• Set up lifecycle schedule: The availability and termination time of the infrastructure resources are scheduled.

• Notify: An email notice is sent to the user stating that the infrastructure has been provisioned.

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Integration When you use Cisco UCS Director to manage Cisco ACI, you get application-ready infrastructure that makes better use of your IT resources, reduces time to revenue, improves compliance, and quickly aligns IT infrastructure with business operations. Cisco UCS Director enables you to define an application container through the APIC. This controller uses your policies to create a secure tenant environment to contain the application, endpoint groups to contain application components, and contracts to enable communication between them. After the network environment has been prepared, Cisco UCS Director provisions the physical and virtual computing and storage infrastructure that resides in the application container. Cisco UCS Director can facilitate final provisioning by initializing storage volumes with appropriate golden images. With point-and-click simplicity, you deliver application-centric IT IaaS through a single interface (Figure 4).

Figure 3. The Self-Service Portal Gives Users What They Need with a Quick Response



Open XML API and REST API for Integration with Other Management PlatformsCisco UCS Director has an open XML API and a REST API that can be used to access the capabilities of Cisco UCS Director with higher-level management platforms. These APIs can also be used to extend the capabilities of Cisco UCS Director. By using the collection of technologies in the Cisco UCS Director Software Development Kit (SDK), you can access Cisco UCS Director data and invoke Cisco UCS Director’s automation and orchestration operations from any application. The SDK includes the REST APIs and Cisco UCS Director Open Automation. Scripting technologies include the Cisco UCS Director PowerShell API, custom tasks bundled in Cisco UCS Director script modules, and the capability to write your own custom tasks using Cisco Cloupia Script, a server-side JavaScript implementation.

With Cisco UCS Director SDK technologies, you can:

• Access Cisco UCS Director programmatically by using the Cisco UCS Director REST API to invoke workflows and obtain reports

• Customize Cisco UCS Director by creating custom tasks and making them accessible from workflows and scripts

• Extend Cisco UCS Director with Cisco UCS Director Open Automation to build connectors that support additional devices and systems

• Use the Cisco UCS Director PowerShell API to connect to Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and other devices that support Microsoft PowerShell

LoadBalancer

Web

Web Web Web

DB

DB DB

App

App App AppCisco ACI

CiscoUCSDirector

CiscoPrimeServiceCatalog

Creates SecureMultitenantEnvironment

Creates ApplicationContainers byProvisioning Computing, Networking,and StorageInfrastructure

ProvisionsApplicationsinto ApplicationContainers

CreatesEndpointGroups

ApplicationPro le

Provisions VirtualMachines

OracleDatabase

Oracle JavaHotSpot JVM

ProvisionsVirtualized

Environments

ProvisionsBare-Metal

Environments

Establishes ServicesBetween EndpointGroups

Apache WebServer

Figure 4. Cisco UCS Director Creates Application Containers from Cisco ACI Application Profiles, and the Cisco Prime Service Catalog Can Provision Applications with Drag-and Drop Simplicity

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Fuel Your Business with Accelerated and Agile ITOneView was never intended to provide IaaS, and although Synergy Composer in combination with Image Streamer will provide many IaaS capabilities, it will support only the Synergy platform. You can get capabilities similar to those that Cisco UCS Director provides if you want the complexity and expense of combining OneView with SAVA to support third-party infrastructure, and Operations Orchestration to provide orchestration. Because these management solutions were not designed to run together, they are not tightly integrated. Rather than delivering IaaS, you can end up integrating tools.

Cisco UCS Director enables you to deploy IaaS in your data center without creating islands of automation and orchestration. This capability, in turn, makes your IT organization far more responsive to the demands of the business. Cisco UCS Director’s unique orchestration and automation capabilities—with support for most leading enterprise platforms—allow you to align business and IT objectives and optimize budget allocation and investments by simplifying and automating core IT processes. You can quickly deliver and demonstrate business value while maintaining security and managing risk in compliance with laws and regulations. Through Cisco UCS Director’s cloud capabilities, you can assume the role of a services broker and facilitate the adoption of best-in-class capabilities to remain competitive, even if this requires outsourcing portions of the IT value chain. Your business will be able to move quickly to take advantage of new markets, new revenue-generating applications, and the massive amounts of data available through big data initiatives. Cisco UCS Director is uniquely suited to deliver IaaS.

For More Information• For a list of all platforms supported by Cisco UCS Director, visit

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/servers-unified-computing/ucs-director/products-device-support-tables-list.html.

• For more information about Cisco UCS Director, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsdirector.

• For more information about Cisco Intercloud Fabric, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/intercloud-fabric.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/c/d/acd8e043-d69b-4f09-bc9e-4168b65aaa71/SQLServer2008OLTP.doc

ttp://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/servers-unified-computing/ucs-director/products-device-support-tables-list.html

ttp://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/servers-unified-computing/ucs-director/products-device-support-tables-list.html

http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsdirector

http://www.cisco.com/go/intercloud-fabric

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