Datacenter – vBrainstorm.com

Last year, Cisco released a new cloud-based system management software named Intersight. In the same vein as CIMC Supervisor, Intersight allows individual hosts to be registered into a central portal where they can be managed. Currently licensed as a base, free level and an paid, essentials level, Intersight gives basic system management for your systems. Intersight is a good first release, although the features that it offers are very slim.

Base License

Officially, the Base license offers the following ‘features,” however Base offers very little functionality that is compelling for C-Series users to adopt Intersight at the current time. If you are using UCS B-Series and HyperFlex, you may get more out of the box – however, I don’t have any systems linked to our instance of either to know for sure.

- Supports Cisco UCS and HyperFlex Systems

- Global inventory and health status

- Tagging and basic global search

- Context-launch of element managers

- Cisco HyperFlex installation

- User customizable dashboard

Automated collection of TechSupport files for UCS Systems and HyperFlex ESXi Clusters

Essentials License

The Essentials License is priced on a subscription basis in 1-year, 3-year and 5-year terms. The official list of functionality is listed below from their app:

- All functionality of Base

- Cisco UCS C-Series management

- Policy-based configuration through Service Profiles

- Detailed inventory and server actions

- Firmware Management

- Virtual Keyboard-Video-Mouse (vKVM)

Server HCL compliance check

For C-Series users, this is where things come alive. Unfortunately, there are some definite deficiencies. The nicest features are the single-signon ability to launch KVM and CIMC access directly from the cloud portal.

Firmware management for C-Series is nowhere near what I would expect of a product like this. There is no automation, no library – simply the ability to push a firmware update with a lot of complicated controls from the website. Firmware management is a let down.

The screenshot to the right shows the tangible tools you can expect on a C-Series server licensed with Essentials.

Requirements

Cisco Intersight supports Cisco UCS and Cisco HyperFlex platforms with the software versions:

Cisco UCS Manager Release 3.2(1) and later
Cisco IMC software Release 3.0(4) and later

Cisco HyperFlex 2.5.1 and later
Cisco UCS Director Release 6.6 and later

Cisco Intersight, when combined with Cisco UCS Director 6.6 and later, allows for updates to the southbound connectors as they are released, instead of having to wait for the next UCS Director release. This allows customers to rapidly support new hardware without having to go through a UCS Director upgrade.

The Good

Registration is fairly simple – you have a Device ID for each of your CIMC and it communicates directly with Intersight. In addition, you have a Claim Code for a system that is able to talk with the cloud. The Claim Code is basically a rotating password that allows you to register the device in the portal.

Once registered, all of the devices appear in the portal interface. The inventory is activated and you are able to see system details. Every system has a health indiciator and you can clearly see all the management IP’s for systems. If a system is connected to a Fabric Interconnect, you also get the name of UCS Domain or HyperFlex cluster and its associated Server Profile.

The Bad

Firmware update for stand-alone systems is a disappointment. It doesn’t offer anything differentiated. Your options are to choose a lot of manual commands to kick off an immediate firmware update on a host. Manual and immediate. Neither are helpful features to administrators. There is a lot of improvement to be had by the company that introduced the world to release sets and firmware bundles. There should be a way to choose directly from the Cisco library of firmware and push those down to managed systems – without having to set all the manual options.

Requirement – secure and centralize print management. But moving traditional Windows print servers into your datacenter will cause a lot of WAN traffic from your branches. WAN links are expensive and bandwidth is a premium resource. Even with SD-WAN solutions that enable companies to use standard internet, instead of MPLS circuits, for branch connectivity, the bandwidth is usually limited. On top of bandwidth issues, print sessions cause bursts of traffic that can trjgger other performance issues for users. All around, its not a great situation.

Enter PrinterLogic, a St. George, Utah, based company that does printer management and enables direct-IP printing, avoiding the WAN entirely. The PrinterLogic solution is straightforward and easy to manage. It allows the central control and reporting of a single print server while avoiding the cost and problems associated with moving print data from the branch to the datacenter and back again.

Management Server

PrinterLogic has a main management server – called the PrinterInstaller server – that is primarily a discovery and management point for their solution. This web application allows administrators to setup lists of printers organized by site locations with nice features like maps and location discovery. PrinterInstaller also allows profiles to be created and the printer driver to be centrally administered and configured.

Getting started is a breeze with two different ways to setup printers. First, you can point PrinterLogic to existing Windows print servers and import printers, drivers and default configurations directly into the product. The second is a network discovery method that allows you to scan and find any previously unmanaged printers in the environment.

The main management server is also a reporting server, allowing administrators to gain insight into their print environment, including unmanaged printers that may be connected to managed workstations. While PrinterLogic doesn’t make any changes to these unmanaged printers – even USB connected printers – it does allow administrators to get analytical data about these devices to be able to bring them into a managed situation or replace them.

Client Agent

The other component is the print agent (aka client) on each workstation. This agent is the primary access method for users. With a click, it launches you into the web portal so you can add and discover new printers. Users can self-service and find the correct or closest printers. Assistance is provided by automatic correlating IP subnets to locations and defaulting users to those locations.

Once the print agent is deployed, any currently configured printers will automatically be converted for you. This is a huge aid for deployments and bringing all the systems and printers into management. The only real work required is deploying the agent to your workstations which can easily be accomplished with SSCM or scripts.

Licensing & Optional Modules

PrinterLogic licensing is very straight forward also – with the base licenses enabling everything discussed so far and it licensed based on the number of printer objects. One of PrinterLogic’s big sales pitches is around reducing the number of queues required for different use cases by allowing a single printer object to have multiple profiles and even print drivers associated for different use cases – like Windows workstations versus a Citrix server. With that, the licensing would roughly equate to the number of printers in your environment.

In addition to base licensing, PrinterLogic offers two optional modules for pull printing and mobile printing. These capabilities are licensed in the same way, by the number of managed printer objects.

Pull Printing

Pull printing, “follow me” printing, or release printing are all ways to describe the same basic functionality – of printing to a queue where the job is held until you walk up and release it from the printer. You can release by authenticating with user and password, with a proximity badge or by authenticating with your mobile phone. When you print a job for a ‘virtual queue’ the job is held at your personal workstation until it is released. This is another way PrinterLogic avoids WAN traffic – by keeping the job onsite since it will likely be released in the same site without having to cross a WAN link.

Mobile Printing

Mobile printing is exactly what it sounds like, enabling printing from phones and tablets. Since these devices are not necessarily on your internal network – possibly sitting on a cellular or guest WiFi network, the printing method changes a bit – however, mobile printing looks a lot like pull printing. Instead of holding a job in a local queue at the workstation, in the case of mobile printing, the queue is at the main management server.

Cloud Option

PrinterLogic also offers a print mangaement solution in a SaaS form, where they host and manage all the infrastructure of your printing environment, and you simply have to configure your printers a web console. Dubbed PrinterCloud, the solution is targeted to SMB users. While it doesn’t offer every single feature of the on-premises version, it is a great solution for smaller environments where IT wants to avoid running the local infrastructure. PrinterLogic says PrinterCloud now has 97% feature parity with the full version, and that the exception is fewer choices for pull-printing release mechanisms. (PrinterCloud does not have simple badge release or all of the support with printer control-panel apps.) The company is working on closing this gap.