Zenoss announced new support for two Cisco UCS server families, ZenPacks for Cisco UCS Central and Cisco UCS Director and a ZenPack supporting VXLAN in Cisco Nexus 9000 switches.

The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is an (x86) architecture datacenter server platform composed of computing hardware, virtualization support, switching fabric, and management software. The Zenoss strategic partnership with Cisco has delivered two products to support the goal of reducing total cost of ownership and improving scalability by integrating the different components into a cohesive platform that can be managed as a single unit. The two products, Cisco UCS Performance Manager and Zenoss Service Assurance are available exclusively through Cisco and the worldwide Cisco channel.

“Zenoss and Cisco are partnered with the common goal of giving enterprise customers and service providers the tools they need to ensure reliable service delivery,” said Pat Emerson, Zenoss VP of Business Development and Channels. “Customers using Cisco technologies to build out large scale virtualized and distributed datacenters rely on Zenoss unified monitoring and service assurance to enhance visibility into these complex environments and optimize performance and availability."

ZenPacks add the ability to monitor new types of devices, but can also be used to add new capabilities to the software itself. The extensibility available via ZenPacks is a critical part of Zenoss, as datacenters continue to become more complex with new hardware, software, cloud services, etc., that need to be monitored. There are hundreds of ZenPacks available, some developed and supported by Zenoss, and many others that are developed and maintained by the Zenoss user community.

Cisco UCS ZenPack provides UCS administrators with a detailed view of the health and performance of their UCS domains. Adding to the existing support for Cisco UCS B-Series blade servers, C-Series rack servers and E-Series small-form-factor blade servers, today’s announcement adds support for Cisco UCS M-Series modular servers, intended for high-performance, scale-out environments, and for Cisco UCS Mini, a small UCS system optimized for branch office, remote office, and small IT environments.

The new ZenPacks for Cisco UCS Central and UCS Director extend Zenoss’ support for Cisco UCS environments to these two key management applications. The ZenPack for Cisco UCS Central provides UCS administrators managing multiple domains with a view of the domains, domain groups, and service profile templates managed by UCS Central, and tracks the assignment of global and local service profiles, as well as global faults. The ZenPack for Cisco UCS Director models the tenants, virtual data centers, and virtual machines managed by UCS Director, and the relationships between them. Together with Zenoss Service Impact, these ZenPacks provide UCS administrators with a comprehensive view of the operations and status of large-scale Cisco UCS environments, as well as an understanding of how problems in the UCS infrastructure can affect the virtualized services that infrastructure supports.

Cisco Nexus 9000 with VXLAN technology is used to enable large-scale virtualized and multi-tenant compute infrastructures across multiple distributed Layer 2 segments. The new Zenoss ZenPack for VXLAN provides a model of VXLAN tunnel endpoints and segments in order to map the logical topology of Layer 2 connectivity between virtual machines across the transport IP network, and to see the impact of failures in the network on the endpoint devices.

Each of these ZenPacks is supported with Zenoss Service Dynamics 4.2.x and 5.0, as well as Zenoss Service Assurance 4.2.x and 5.0.