SCOM 2012 Monitoring Cisco UCS – Part 1 Emulator Setup

In an ideal world scenario everything you would monitor is from Microsoft but in a real world scenario there are certain situation where you hit a foreign system type from a different company especially if you have to monitor hardware stuff.

As in these cloudy days Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) is getting more popular to build Hyper-V clusters and clouds. You might know that there exist so-called emulators which simulate a more or less complete UCS system. This is for SCOM guys like me the ideal starting point to test management packs .

Here I would like to show you how to set up this emulator, how to install the management pack and briefly show what you will get out of this management pack.

• Part 1 – UCS Emulator Setup
• Part 2 – Install UCS MP 2.5
• Part 3 – Overview UCS MP 2.5

Pre-requisites:

• Get the UCS Emulator, management pack and “Quick Start Guide” from here and extract the files using e.g. WinRAR or 7 zip
• Get VM Ware Player from here
• Windows 7 system which is capable of running VM Ware Player
• A Mozilla compatible browser e.g. Google Chrome or Firefox

First I extracted the UCS Emulator file to e.g. C:\UCSPE on my Windows 7 notebook. Next I installed on the Windows 7 system VM Ware Player  and started VM Ware Player to import the extracted file.

Go to “Open a Virtual Machine”…

Select the UCSPE.vmx file and click “Open”…

Next go to “Virtual Machine Settings…”

Change the settings to “Bridged”. This will connect your virtual machine to the same network adapter as the host system uses. Next start the virtual machine…

Configuration:

After the machine starts some initial configuration will be done and after a few minute you will see the start screen.

In the first place you will see the management IP address which will be assigned by DHCP (default). You also see the two accounts to access the emulator. In our environment we will always use the config account,

• config (password: config)
• cliuser (password: cliuser)

Login into the emulator using the config account…

Choose a) and change the IP address for your environment…

Administration:

There are two ways to administer the UCS Emulator. The java based console by clicking here “Launch UCS Manager”

or just connect to the web interface by typing the URL

http://[management IP address] e.g http://192.168.0.205

in Google Chrome (IE is not supported).

Immediately you will be provided with the management frontend….

Go to “Start-up Inventory” and click

The emulator will restart and be ready in a few minutes. What we have done so far is to configure the emulator with a fixed IP address and  set the default hardware setup from the emulator to use.

The default “out-of-the-box” setup consists out of one chassis “Chassis 1” including 7 servers (different models), 8 fans and 4 PSU.

Of course you could configure your own hardware as you need. It goes even that far that you could import a customer setting into your emulator. Please refer to the Cisco manual for further instructions.

Now we are eager to see how it will appear in SCOM 2012 …