Introduction
Automation is the need of the hour. It is a powerful tool that can scale a business, provide significant cost savings, and allow IT staff to focus on strategic rather than administrative work.
A wide range of datacenter and cloud operations can be automated, resulting in faster operations. Thanks to automation, IT environments can scale more quickly with fewer errors and are more responsive to business needs. The automation capabilities of the FlexPod Datacenter and Express solutions are a major step towards simplifying processes, minimizing errors, and increasing efficiency.
FlexPod is a best practice datacenter architecture that includes the following components - Cisco Unified Computing System, Cisco Nexus switches, Cisco MDS switches, and NetApp AFF/FAS/ASA systems. FlexPod's validated architecture provides a solid infrastructure foundation for a variety of business applications and solutions. With continuous integration with Cisco and NetApp technologies, FlexPod is at the forefront of innovation: through simplified management with Cisco Intersight, advanced hybrid cloud capabilities with NetApp ONTAP, and faster performance with end-to-end NVMe. FlexPod Datacenter and FlexPod Express deliver a baseline configuration and have the flexibility to be sized and optimized to accommodate many different use cases and requirements.
Existing FlexPod Datacenter customers can manage their FlexPod Express system with the same set of tools they are familiar with. New FlexPod Express customers can easily scale and manage their FlexPod solutions as they scale and grow their environment.
FlexPod automation solutions using Ansible can further improve IT efficiency and reduce operation errors. Infrastructure deployment and service provisioning which used to take hours can now be completed in just minutes. With FlexPod automation you can save time and be more productive.
Ansible Overview
Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. Ansible is agentless, temporarily connecting remotely via SSH or Windows Remote Management to do its tasks. It can automate IT environments whether they are hosted on traditional bare metal servers, virtualization platforms, or in the cloud. Ansible includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. Vendor-specific modules for automation are available via Ansible Galaxy collections.
For more information, refer to Ansible documentation. Now, let’s look at the details about deploying FlexPod Datacenter using Ansible in UCSM and IMM mode, post that we will look at FlexPod Express deployment using Ansible.
FlexPod Datacenter Automation with Ansible
FlexPod Datacenter delivers an optimal multipurpose foundation for various workloads and applications. FlexPod automation delivers a fully automated solution deployment that covers all sections of the infrastructure and application layer. There are two modes to configure Cisco UCS, one is UCSM (UCS Managed) and the other is IMM (Intersight Managed Mode).
FlexPod with UCSM (UCS Managed)
You can leverage Ansible playbooks that have been designed to setup the day0 FlexPod using UCSM. It includes the configuration of the NetApp Storage, Cisco Network and Compute, and VMware. This automation capability augments the standard manual deployment procedures that are provided in the deployment guide.
Watch out the below demo videos to gain more insights into the FlexPod Datacenter with UCSM Automation via Ansible:
- Cisco Nexus Setup
- NetApp ONTAP Setup
- Cisco UCS Setup
- Cisco MDS Setup
- VMware ESXi Setup
- VMware vCenter Setup
FlexPod with IMM (Intersight Managed Mode)
The Cisco Intersight platform is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) infrastructure lifecycle management platform that delivers simplified configuration, deployment, maintenance, and support. It is designed to be modular, so customers can adapt services based on their individual requirements.
This section covers the day0 FlexPod setup using UCS IMM. The configuration of compute, networking, and storage including the hypervisor layers are automated by leveraging Ansible playbooks that have been designed to setup the Cisco, NetApp, and VMware components as per the solution best practices that were identified during the testing and validation.
Refer to the FlexPod IaC document for step-by-step deployment of FlexPod via Ansible. The standard manual procedures for configuring FlexPod are explained in the deployment guide.
Watch out the below demo videos to gain more insights into the FlexPod Datacenter with UCS IMM Automation via Ansible:
- Cisco Nexus Setup
- NetApp ONTAP Setup
- Cisco UCS Setup
- Cisco MDS Setup
- VMware ESXi Setup
- VMware vCenter Setup
FlexPod Express Automation with Ansible
FlexPod Express offers customers an entry-level solution with technologies available from Cisco and NetApp. FlexPod® Express with Cisco UCS C-series Standalone Rack Servers and NetApp AFF is a predesigned, best practice architecture built on the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS), the Cisco Nexus family of switches, and NetApp storage technologies.
You can leverage Ansible playbooks that have been designed to setup the day0 FlexPod Express with local boot using NVMe/TCP & NFS storage protocols. With Ansible the day0 deployment of FlexPod Express would just take less than 2 hours. Majority of steps are automated to provide simple and seamless deployment experience.
Refer to the IaC document for step-by-step deployment via Ansible. To understand the design and manual deployment steps of FlexPod Express, refer to the latest deployment guide.
Highlights of Ansible deployment
FlexPod deployment with Ansible has different phases which involves the exchange of parameters or attributes between compute, network, storage, and virtualization and may also involve some manual intervention. All phases have been clearly demarcated and the implementation with automation is split into equivalent phases via Ansible playbooks with a ‘tag’ based execution of a specific section of the component’s configuration.
The Ansible playbooks, to configure the different sections of the solution invoke a set of Roles and consume the associated variables that are required to setup the solution. The variables needed for the solution can be split into two categories – user input and defaults/ best practices. Based on the installation environment customers can choose to modify the variables to suit their requirements and proceed with the automated installation.
The automation for ONTAP is scalable in nature that can configure anywhere from a single HA pair to a fully scaled 24 node ONTAP AFF/FAS cluster. After the base infrastructure is setup with NetApp ONTAP, Cisco Network and Compute, and VMware, customers can also deploy NetApp ONTAP Tools for VMware vSphere (formerly Virtual Storage Console), SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere, and Active IQ Unified Manager in an automated fashion. Another key benefit of this automation package is that customers can reuse parts of the code/roles to execute repeatable tasks using the tags that are associated with the fine-grained tasks within the roles.
Conclusion
Automation is imperative as business requirements are so dynamic and is critical to adapt to the enterprise needs. Infrastructure administrators are in need of processes which give the operational efficiency avoiding human errors and productivity of their IT landscape. The FlexPod automation helps customers to be able to build repeatable building blocks which is continuously built and updated to align with the technology innovations incorporating all the best practices conforming to the joint reference architectures from both Cisco and NetApp.
