Cisco Intersight

Cisco Intersight is an SaaS cloud operations platform that provides automation and orchestration to support the lifecycle management of a private cloud. It is a modular platform, allowing only the needed services to be used. As Cisco Intersight is an SaaS platform, it runs in the Cisco cloud, which makes it accessible from everywhere. The data center infrastructure is connected to Cisco Intersight and is managed and maintained from there. The IT departments can add multiple data centers, as this will simplify operations and monitoring. Cisco Intersight offers services to manage the whole cloud stack—from the underlying physical infrastructure, all the way up to the application level (see Figure 21-17).

  

Figure 21-17 Cisco Intersight

The Intersight Infrastructure Service supports an advanced infrastructure—Cisco UCS servers, Cisco HyperFlex integrated platforms, and Hitachi and PureStorage storage solutions. The Intersight Virtualization Service and the Intersight Assist appliance provide support for VMware virtualization and the ability to pool resources. Intersight Assist also adds support for third-party hardware and software.

Furthermore, the Intersight Kubernetes Service allows Kubernetes clusters to be configured and provisioned from the cloud. With the underlying infrastructure and the virtualization being under the management of Intersight and the Intersight Kubernetes Service, IT departments can deploy and run containerized workloads in local data centers and public clouds.

The Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer helps IT departments solve the challenges of underutilized on-premises infrastructure, public cloud overprovisioning, and cost overruns, optimizing the approach to troubleshooting and monitoring, which leads to saved time cycles, in the multicloud. Support for more than 50 common platforms and public clouds provides real-time, full-stack visibility across your applications and infrastructure. This allows for optimal distribution of workloads across private and public clouds. Here are some of the capabilities of the Intersight Workload Optimizer:

  • Manage resource allocation and workload placement in all your infrastructure environments, in a single pane of glass, for supply and demand across the combined private and public clouds
  • Optimize cloud costs with automated selection of instances, reserved instances (RIs), relational databases, and storage tiers based on workload consumption and optimal costs
  • Lower the risk for migrations to and from the cloud with a data-driven scenario modeling engine
  • Dynamically scale, delete, and purchase the right cloud resources to ensure performance at the lowest cost
  • Continuously optimize workload placement and cut overprovisioning based on utilization trends
  • Scale Kubernetes container limits/requests up or down
  • Monitor and recommend Kubernetes clusters scaling up or down
  • Support modeling what-if scenarios based on the real-time environment for the Kubernetes clusters

Cisco Intersight Cloud Orchestrator is a powerful tool. It allows IT departments to create and execute complex workflows that can provision environments in the data centers. The Intersight Cloud Orchestrator converts a data center into a private cloud. It includes a library with predefined and custom tasks for the setup and provisioning of the underlying compute, storage, networking, and virtualized infrastructures. The Workflow Designer, shown in Figure 21-18, offers a graphical user interface (GUI) to create, validate, execute, and manage the workflows. Additionally, there are some sample workflows for provisioning storage, compute, network, and virtualization.

  

Figure 21-18 Workflow Designer in the Intersight Orchestrator

Last, but not least, is the Intersight Terraform Service, shown in Figure 21-19, which integrates the Terraform Cloud with Cisco Intersight and provides support for Infrastructure as Code, an important component for any DevOps organization.

  

Figure 21-19 Cisco Intersight Service for HashiCorp Terraform

Because HashiCorp Terraform is supported in all the major public cloud providers, and the DevOps teams can use it for automated provisioning of resources in the cloud, its adoption in private clouds has been a challenge, as there was the need to deploy additional Terraform agents on premises, change firewall rules and access, and so on. With the integration of the Terraform Cloud with Cisco Intersight, the adoption of Terraform has become seamless and natural. Cisco Intersight already manages the private cloud, so the automation extends from the public clouds used by your organization to the data centers, thus forming a successful, transparent multicloud.