Cisco UCS Performance Manager v1.1.0

Since the UCS Server platform was introduced in early 2009 it has revolutionized how we do servers and everything that goes on inside servers.  We got 10G everything from the server all the way to the core and everything in between.  While this has proven to be nothing short of awesome for server admins and CIO's who desire to be on the bleeding edge of the bandwidth spectrum we never really knew how to rate that level of awesome on a measurable scale.  Sure the Fabric Interconnects run the NX-OS platform and CLI commands exist to look at stats and counters buried in the bowels of the code but in this day of Sofware Defined Everything (SDE (Patent Pending)) we needed a way to present that information to admins and execs quickly and in a format that can be use to make business decisions regarding capacity planning and performance.  Enter UCS Performance Manager, this tool give us visibility into the inter workings of the UCS "secret sauce" that we once just trusted because it "works really well".

Version 1.0 of UCS Performance Manager was released in October 2014 with the updated 1.1 package available as of March 9th 2015.  This post will cover high level installation and reporting details of version 1.1 deployed in our lab environment.

Licensing:
UCS PM comes in 2 flavors.  The Express package and the Integrated Infrastructure package.  Express package is limited to Cisco UCS support only and the Integrated Infrastructure package enables the user to have visibility into compute, network, storage and connected hypervisors.

Installation:
Cisco provides the virtual appliance in the typical OVA format to be installed into the vSphere infrastructure or an ISO format if installing on a Windows machine in a physical or Hyper V environment.  Setup was a breeze with only needing to provide a hostname, IP, and license information.  Once the VM is deployed and configured, you'll login to the Web GUI, add your UCS Domain, Storage, Hypervisor and VCenter information and off you go. Credit to Jim Casselman for doing the installation and providing feedback.

Overview:
After exploring the UCS Performance Manager for just an hour I quickly realized this product is packed with gobs of useful information, statistics, and reports any administrator would love to have at their disposal.  The ability to have a visual representation of what's happening inside the UCS chassis is very useful for troubleshooting, monitoring and capacity planning.  Here are some screen shots showing some of the valuable information UCS performance manager can display.

Infrastructure:Bandwidth Usage - At a glance we can see how much bandwidth is being used by the LAN, SAN and Server Chassis

Infrastructure: Dynamic View - The dynamic topology view gives an high level overview of the UCS components and any associated events

Infrastructure: Events - The events view shows all events in the system.  Administrators can easily see low to critical faults in a single view.

Infrastructure: vSphere - You can add VCenter server and monitor all virtual machines in your environment.  Note, you'll need the Integrated Infrastructure license to add vSphere components

Reports - Cisco UCS Performance Manager comes pre-loaded with plenty of useful canned reports.  Date ranges can be defined to give specific data for specific time frames.

Summary:
Cisco seems to have gotten off the ground running with this first generation monitoring console.  The information available is useful and well laid out in the GUI.  Installation and setup are a breeze and the application does not require a lot of TLC after it's initially setup.  This is certainly something all UCS systems should be accompanied with as it provides lots of useful information that was not otherwise available before.

More information can be found on UCS Performance Manager here.