With Unitrends release 7.3 and higher, you can back up and restore Cisco UCS service profiles and related configuration objects. In the event of a disaster, you can use this feature to quickly restore your service profiles, greatly reducing the recovery time objective (RTO) of reconfiguring your network and servers.
The Cisco UCS environment provides a “virtual chassis” that enables you to create and assign hardware profiles to individual logical servers. You can then bring up the logical server on dedicated hardware that you can easily migrate to another server in the case of hardware failure, or migrate between servers that do not require 24/7 uptime for efficient hardware reuse.
For UCS B-Series blade servers and C-Series rack-mount servers, allocation of UCS resources and hardware is managed at the domain level by the Cisco UCS manager. Each server in the UCS is a “logical server” that utilizes various resources as defined in the server’s service profile, and there is a one-to-one relationship between a service profile and a physical server. The service profile references hardware requirements, such as hardware identifiers, firmware, state, configuration, connectivity and behavior, but is completely separate from the physical UCS environment. Once a service profile is instantiated and associated with a given blade, rack-mount server, or server in a server pool, you configure a PXE server or map a bootable ISO image to the virtual-media CDROM drive to install the desired hypervisor or operating system (OS). See the “Cisco UCS Manager Configuration Common Practices and Quick Start Guide” for details.