Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations Introduction 9 Intersight Foundations 13 Introduction 14 Intersight architecture 15 Licensing 44 Wrapping up 45 Security 47 Introduction 48 Connectivity 49 Claiming 51 Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) 54 Audit logs 58 Data security 60 Security advantages 62 Wrapping up 64 Infrastructure Operations 65 Introduction 66 Device health and monitoring 67 Intelligence feeds 74 Integrated support 88 Infrastructure configuration 94 ITSM integration 101 UCS Director integration 104 Wrapping up 111 Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations Server Operations 113 Introduction 114 Supported systems 115 Actions 116 Server deployment 125 Domain management 130 Firmware updates 141 Wrapping up 146 Network Operations 147 Introduction 148 Policy-driven network infrastructure 149 Wrapping up 158 Storage Operations 159 Introduction 160 HyperFlex 162 Deploying HyperFlex Clusters 177 Managing HX Clusters 189 Traditional storage operations 204 Wrapping up 209 Virtualization Operations 211 Introduction 212 Claiming a vCenter target 214 Contextual operations 217 Virtualization orchestration 225 Wrapping up 227 Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations Kubernetes 229 Introduction 230 Intersight Kubernetes Service 232 Benefits 236 Creating clusters with IKS 237 Intersight Workload Engine 241 Wrapping up 242 Workload Optimization 243 Introduction 244 Users and roles 248 Targets and configuration 250 The Supply Chain 254 Actions 258 Groups and policies 261 Planning and placement 268 Public cloud 271 Wrapping up 277 Orchestration 279 Introduction 280 Automation and orchestration 281 Intersight orchestration 283 Wrapping up 304 Programmability 305 Introduction 306 Client SDKs 312 Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations Authentication and authorization 314 Crawl, walk, run 320 Advanced usage 360 Next steps: use cases 370 Infrastructure as Code 383 Introduction 384 What is Infrastructure as Code? 386 HashiCorp Terraform 392 Cisco and Infrastructure as Code 396 Wrapping up 405 Acknowledgments 407 Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations Introduction Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations 10 Introduction Cisco Intersight is a cloud operations platform that delivers intelligent visualization, optimization, and orchestration for applications and infrastructure across multicloud environments. Intersight offers a new paradigm that allows traditional infrastructures to be operated and maintained with the agility of cloud-native infrastructure. Conversely, Intersight provides cloud native environments with many of the proven stability and governance principles inherent to traditional infrastructure. Getting to this point has been a fascinating journey, especially for a longstanding technology company such as Cisco. The initial development of Intersight and its continued evolution has been a path filled with both exciting innovations and its fair share of challenges to overcome, requiring cultural shifts, partnerships, and an extremely dedicated engineering team. Managing and operating IT infrastructure is one of the ongoing struggles that many organizations have dealt with for years. Over time, there has been little consolidation in the data center space — not only has the number of bare metal devices expanded rapidly, but the management challenge has been exacerbated by the exponential increase in storage, network, and compute virtualization. Technologies have been evolving that allow for increased agility and faster response times, but little has been done to decrease complexity. With the rapid adoption of these new technologies, organizational silos have often increased and there has been no quick solution to ease the management burden. Antithetically, both IT vendors and third-party companies have created more and more tools and consoles to “make life easier.” All this has achieved is to add tooling sprawl on top of the already overwhelming technology sprawl. Operations teams have been stretched thin and often have had to divide-and-conquer to develop the specialized skill sets to get their work done. To compensate, IT groups have been broken down into application, security, performance, cloud, network, virtualization, storage, automation, edge, backup, Linux, Windows, and other sub-teams. Each of these teams typically adopts a suite of tools for their piece of the operations pie. Most tools do not span vendors and certainly do not account for both virtual and physical servers. Out of this IT malaise, two different paths have emerged in data center operations. Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations Introduction 11 The first path was focused on creating a comprehensive view of environments, and some adventurous operations teams even endeavored to “roll their own” sets of tools and dashboards. These environments consisted of a conglomeration of open source tools and custom scripts to scrape log files and poll the environment for issues. If correlation happened at all, it was a manual effort, often resulting in many failed attempts to complete root cause analysis. Also, most of these homegrown management systems relied heavily on one or two key individuals in the organization. If those people were to leave the company, the management system usually came crumbling down shortly after their departure. For the second path, rather than creating their own management tools, organizations began to adopt commercial software packages that were designed to consolidate the vendor-or domain-specific tools. Legacy tools such as Microsoft SMS, Tivoli Management Framework, and HP OpenView were expensive, cumbersome, and rarely fully implemented. These and other similar tools created what was often referred to as the “wedding cake” approach to systems management, with tool upon tool in a layered manager-of-managers approach. This complexity led many organizations to quickly begin adopting the public cloud after Amazon launched the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service in 2006. Over time, AWS, Google, Azure, and other public cloud providers have built services that are vital for businesses. However, the public cloud has not solved the operational issue; it has relocated the problem and in many ways added complexity. Over the past several years, the industry has seen the rise of the AI Ops buzzword. The concept suggests that IT organizations should use assistive technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to offload burdensome manual tasks, become more efficient, and improve uptime. Tools using these technologies have emerged in the industry, promising improved operations capabilities across private, public, and even hybrid cloud environments. Cisco identified a major gap between concept and reality concerning true multicloud infrastructure operations, which include not just traditional Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations 12 Introduction hardware infrastructures such as servers, storage, and networking but also software resources such as hypervisors, virtual workloads, container services, and public cloud services. Cisco introduced Intersight to address this gap as a true cloud operations platform across these myriad infrastructure components, applying appropriate AI Ops techniques to make systems not only easier to manage but more efficient and performant. As a result, Intersight allows operations teams to: • Monitor their entire environment, from infrastructure to applications, and gain visibility into their complex interdependencies • Connect and correlate multiple threads of telemetry from each component to optimize workload resources and assure performance while lowering costs • Establish consistent environments by orchestrating technical and non-technical policies across each component This book provides an in-depth overview of the entire Intersight platform, including key concepts, architectural principles, and best practices that will assist organizations as they transition to a cloud operations model. Its authors are subject matter experts with decades of experience drawn from many corners of the IT landscape. The book supports both an end-to-end reading approach as well as dipping into chapters of individual interest as needed. Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations Intersight Foundations Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations 14 Intersight Foundations Introduction Intersight was fundamentally designed to be consumed as a cloud service, either directly from the Intersight Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud or an instance within an organization's private cloud. While it can be a challenge for many organizations to move from the traditional, customer-hosted management application to a cloud-based service, the benefits of doing so are undeniable. Cisco Intersight: A Handbook for Intelligent Cloud Operations Intersight Foundations 15 Intersight architecture Unlimited scalability Every management tool requires some sort of database mechanism to maintain a device inventory. For traditional management applications, this is sometimes embedded with the application itself or is a link to an external database. The external databases are sometimes small unique instances, else the applications can sometimes utilize existing, large production database instances. The small unique instance is