If your data center supports virtualized environments, you already use VMware vCenter to manage your virtual infrastructure. With Cisco HyperFlex systems, you can continue to do so without creating another management silo. With a single vCenter plug-in, you can manage your physical and virtual hyperconverged infrastructure through a single, intuitive interface. If you have already started to manage your data center infrastructure with workflow-based Cisco UCS Director, you can use it to manage and automate your hyperconverged environment as well. The reason for this flexibility is that each management approach uses a unified API provided by the Cisco UCS Manager. This integrated, model-based management software is built into all your Cisco server and storage infrastructure (see Figure 15-8).

Figure 15-8 HyperFlex Centralized Management

If you want to manage your entire data center infrastructure with a single workflow-based automation tool, you can use the Cisco UCS Director. This single tool can manage your full application lifecycle, whether applications are deployed in your hyperconverged environment; on your blade or rack servers; or on your networking, storage, or third-party systems.

Cisco management automates tasks to reduce the chance of errors that can cause downtime. The Cisco UCS Director provides easy-to-use automation, extends to heterogeneous environments, maintains its awareness of your environments, and organizes your environments into a holistic unified view so that you can see and control everything.

Cisco UCS management encompasses all your Cisco UCS infrastructure, whether it is converged, hyperconverged, or bare metal. You can even automate processes yourself with interfaces to Cisco UCS Manager through Microsoft PowerShell and Python. In addition, you can integrate the Cisco CloudCenter solution with your Cisco HyperFlex system to facilitate hybrid cloud mobility across clouds, further increasing your infrastructure agility.

Independent Resource Scaling

Cisco HyperFlex systems include a purpose-built, high-performance distributed file system that expands the boundaries of the hyperconverged infrastructure. You can scale your environment simply by adding nodes to the configuration. You can also choose to independently scale computing or storage capacity to meet the specific needs of your applications. Cisco predefined networking resources expand to incorporate the new nodes (see Figure 15-9). All this is accomplished without the need for you to change or adjust your software or networking configuration or interrupt your cluster operations. The new node is efficiently and automatically added to your environment with no downtime.

Figure 15-9 HyperFlex Resource Optimization

With Cisco HyperFlex systems, you can scale your storage by adding a Cisco UCS rack server–based storage node to the cluster. You can scale your computing performance by adding Cisco UCS blade server–based computing nodes. Clusters can scale up to 576 CPUs and 12 TB of RAM, 1024 virtual machines per host, and 64 nodes per cluster. You can scale with a graphics-processing-intensive computing node by adding Cisco UCS C240 or C220 rack servers to the cluster.