About protecting Cisco UCS service profiles

A service profile may be associated with a template and various policies. A service profile template can be used to quickly create additional service profiles. Policies can be used to enforce rules to help ensure consistency. For example, a boot policy defines how a server boots, including boot devices, methods, and boot order.

Because service profiles are essential to managing the servers in your Cisco UCS environment, it is important that you protect these configurations. Unitrends leverages native Cisco UCS data protection for profile backups and restores, utilizing the Cisco XML API. Unitrends’ UCS profile backups capture all supported profiles, templates, pools, and policies in your UCS environment. For a description of each supported object that may be included in the UCS profile backup, see Identifying files in UCS service profile backups. Once you have a UCS profile backup, you can easily restore these items to quickly spin up your Cisco UCS environment in the event of a disaster, greatly reducing RTO.

Note: The following objects are not included in Unitrends’ UCS profile backups: BIOS defaults, IPMI access policies, management firmware policies (deprecated, replaced by host firmware packages), and iSCSI authentication profiles.

Note that UCS profile backups capture only service profiles, templates, pools, and policies. To protect UCS servers themselves, add them as clients to the Unitrends system and schedule file-level and bare metal backups as needed. See Protecting UCS blade and rack-mount servers for details.

Data protection strategy for Cisco UCS service profiles

Unitrends recommends running weekly or daily full backups of your UCS profiles, templates, pools, and policies. Differential and incremental backups are not supported. If your profile data changes frequently, you can schedule fulls to run throughout each day at any desired frequency. If you schedule the backup every few minutes, be aware that if the last backup is still running, the next backup is added to the queue and will be started once the last run completes.