Purpose

Provide ability that user can use UCS blades as hardware resource pool in CloudStack, and provisioning operation system/hypervisor on UCS blade by CloudStack baremetal feature

User workflow [new in 4.2.1]

Feature Specifications

• The feature would allow user to register UCS manager through CloudStack UI and provision OS/hypervisor on blades by CloudStack baremetal feature 
• Currently this feature would only support:
  • Registering UCS manager
  • Listing UCS profiles in CloudStack UI
  • Listing UCS blades 
  • Selecting a UCS profile and associating it to a selected blade
  • Provisioning the blade in previous step with baremetal template
  • Only supporting CloudStack basic mode
• Not supported features:
  • Releasing a blade back to resource pool(in next version)
  • Sync with UCS manager(assuming user won't change UCS hardware setup after registering into CloudStack)

Use cases

NOTE: Please refer to section "Web Service APIs" for usage of API showing in this section. For UCS terms and instructions that is out of scope of this documentation, please refer to attached Cisco documents for details  

1. add UCS manager

once you have your UCS setup in lab, you should have below information:

• UCS manager IP address
• UCS manager username
• UCS manager password

call CloudStack API addUcsManager to register UCS manager. After registering, CloudStack will automatically discover blades and add them into resource pool. The resource pool is created automatically after UCS manager was added.

LIMITATIONS: in this phase, we assume user will not add/remove blades in setup after registering UCS manager into CloudStack. That means, CloudStack will not notice your changes on UCS hardware after UCS manager was registered

2. list UCS templates [new in 4.2.1]

you are able to retrieve pre-created UCS templates from UCS manager by calling listUcsTemplates. You do this largely before you are about to create a profile off template and associate the profile to a selected blade. see instantiateUcsTemplateAndAssocaciateToBlade

NOTE: 1. templates are synced between CloudStack and UCS manager. Any new added or removed templates are reflected next time you call this API.

           2. per Cisco suggestion, only initial-template should be used for CloudPlatform integration

3. list UCS blades

after registering UCS manager into CloudStack(use case 1), CloudStack will consult UCS manager for current blades in UCS setup. These blades would be retrieved by calling listUcsBlade. You do this largely before associating a

profile to a blade which is explained in later use case.

LIMITATIONS: in this phase, we assume user will not add/remove blades in setup after registering UCS manager into CloudStack. That means, CloudStack will not notice your changes on UCS hardware after UCS manager was registered

4. instantiate UCS template and associate result profile to blade [new in 4.2.1]

once you have a template DN returned by listUcsTemplates, you are able to call instantiateUcsTemplateAndAssocaciateToBlade to create a profile and associate it to a UCS blade returned by listUcsBlade.

NOTE: this operation will take a couple of minutes to finish, please wait with patient until it finished or timeout. The default timeout is 60 minutes which is not configurable at current stage

5. adding a UCS blade to baremetal cluster

once you have baremetal cluster created, you are able to add an associated UCS blade to baremetal cluster by calling addBaremetalHost. Creating Baremetal cluster and usage of addBaremetalHost is beyond scope of this document,

please refer to "CloudStack Administrator Guide" for details.

NOTE: this is not the preferred way as it requires user to get IPMI information required by addBaremetaHost API from UCS profile. I was going to add a new API which does such things in automation manner, however, baremetal kickstart feature

has not been finished at that time so I postponed this feature temporarily. It will come out soon.

6. disassociate profile from UCS blade.

you can call disassociateUcsProfileFromBlade to remove a profile from UCS blade. An optional parameter deleteProfile is given to indicate if the unassociated profile needs to be deleted after disassociation.

7. sync between UCS manager and CloudPlatform [new in 4.2.1]

sometimes user may directly operate on UCS manager for stuff like association or dissociation, this makes states between CloudPlatform and UCS manager out of sync. You can call refreshUcsBlades to instruct CloudPlatform to sync states with UCS manager

Architecture and Design description

Implementation:

The feature is implemented as a plugin service locating in incubator-cloudstack/plugins/hypervisors/ucs. The service is self-contained with own API, it will not interfere with workflow of other CloudStack components.

web services APIs

addUcsManager

curl "http://localhost:8096/?command=addUcsManager&zoneid=$zoneid&name=ucsmanager&url=$url&username=admin&password=C1tr1x99"

addUcsManager response

listUcsTemplates

curl "http://localhost:8096/?command=listUcsProfile&ucsmanagerid=$ucsid"

listUcsTemplates response (list response)

listUcsBlades

curl "http://localhost:8096/?command=listUcsBlade&ucsmanagerid=$ucsid"

listUcsBlade response (list response)

instantiateUcsTemplateAndAssocaciateToBlade

example:

curl http://10.215.3.5:8080/client/api?command=instantiateUcsTemplateAndAssocaciateToBlade&ucsmanagerid=9a34c186-12fa-4bbc-af04-5f1a2bf7ae4a&templatedn=org-root/ls-test&bladeid=3d491c6e-f0b6-40b0-bf6e-f89efdd73c30&profilename=xxxx&response=json&sessionkey=jmyGgRQO30V0QPKm%2BLcx9sl0ciU%3D&_=1381451319292

instantiateUcsTemplateAndAssocaciateToBlade response:

the same as listUcsBlade response, while associatedProfileDn points to profile the blade associates to

example:

{ "queryasyncjobresultresponse" : {"accountid":"970b694a-2f8c-11e3-a77d-000c29b36ff5","userid":"970b7b4f-2f8c-11e3-a77d-000c29b36ff5","cmd":"org.apache.cloudstack.api.InstantiateUcsTemplateAndAssociateToBladeCmd","jobstatus":1,"jobprocstatus":0,"jobresultcode":0,"jobresulttype":"object","jobresult":{"ucsblade":{"id":"3d491c6e-f0b6-40b0-bf6e-f89efdd73c30","ucsmanagerid":"9a34c186-12fa-4bbc-af04-5f1a2bf7ae4a","bladedn":"sys/chassis-1/blade-3","profiledn":"org-root/ls-xxxx"}},"created":"2013-10-10T17:29:00-0700","jobid":"cd9d0282-4dae-463f-80b6-451e168e2e92"} }

listUcsManagers:

listUcsManager response

the same as addUcsManager

disassociateUcsProfileFromBlade 

disassociateUcsProfileFromBlade response:

success response

refreshUcsBlades

refreshUcsBlades response:

the same to listUcsBlades

UI flow

DB Schema:

mysql> describe ucs_blade;
+----------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field          | Type                | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+----------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id             | bigint(20) unsigned | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| uuid           | varchar(40)         | YES  | UNI | NULL    |                |
| ucs_manager_id | bigint(20) unsigned | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| host_id        | bigint(20) unsigned | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| dn             | varchar(512)        | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| profile_dn     | varchar(512)        | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+----------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

mysql> describe ucs_manager;
+----------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field    | Type                | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+----------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id       | bigint(20) unsigned | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| uuid     | varchar(40)         | YES  | UNI | NULL    |                |
| zone_id  | bigint(20) unsigned | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| name     | varchar(128)        | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| url      | varchar(255)        | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| username | varchar(255)        | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| password | varchar(255)        | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
+----------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

Change History:

4.2.1:

1. clone profile was deprecated. In 4.2, when use associates a profile to blade, he chooses a profile and CloudPlatform will clone that profile to a new one. In 4.2.1, instead of choosing a profile, user chooses a profile templateand CloudPlatform will instantiate a profile from that template.

2. list profile was deprecated. In line with change #1, in 4.2.1 user can only list profile templates when associating a blade.

3. Adding sync blades button. In UI, there is a Refresh UCS Blades button which will sync blade status between UCS manager and CloudPlatform when clicked

4. Deprecated event: UCS.ASSOCIATEPROFILE. New events:    UCS.TEMPLATEASSOCIATION, UCS.REFRESHBLADES