Introduction

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

Document History

Glossary

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 profile 

you are able to retrieve pre-created UCS profile from UCS manager by calling listUcsProfile. You do this largely before associating a profile to a blade which is explained in later use case. 

NOTE: profile is synced between CloudStack and UCS manager. That means any change on profiles will be reflected next time you call listUcsProfile.

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. associate a UCS profile to UCS blade

once you have known how to retrieve UCS profiles and UCS blades through CloudStack, you are able to associate a UCS profile to a UCS blade by calling associatesUscProfileToBlade. When you doing this, CloudStack actually clones

a new profile from the profile you selected in "list UCS profile", which means the profile you selected is used as a template of actual profile associated to the blade. You can check the new created profile in UCS manager.

NOTE: this operation will take a couple of minutes to finish, please wait with patient until it finished or timeout. The default timeout is 10 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. deleting a host that is from UCS blade

once you decide to return a UCS blade which has been added to baremetal cluster to resource pool, you should first remove the host from baremetal cluster by calling deleteHost. You don't have to do it by calling API, CloudStack UI has prefectly

implemented it. Details could be find in "CloudStack Administrator Guide"

At stage, releasing UCS profile from UCS blade has not been implemented yet. You have to go to UCS manager to do so. You can identify a blade in UCS manager using its DN which is part of response of listUcsBlade API, once the blade is identified, disassociating

profile would release resource the blade uses.

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

listUcsProfile

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

listUcsProfile response (list response)

listUcsBlade

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

listUcsBlade response (list response)

associatesUscProfileToBlade

example:

curl "http://localhost:8096/?command=associatesUscProfileToBlade&ucsmanagerid=$ucsid&profiledn=$profileDn&bladeid=$bladeId"

associatesUscProfileToBlade response:

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

listUcsManager:

listUcsManager response

the same as addUcsManager

UI flow

• A new page for adding resource pool
• A new page for adding UCS manage in 'Add Resrouce Pool' page
• A new page for associating UCS profile to a selected UCS blade
• A new page for convert a UCS blade to Baremetal hostUI should be implemented using pluggable UI framework, for it's able to be dsiabled when needs

Appendix

Appendix A: Cisco related document, Part

Appendix B: