How cool is this – having an iPhone or iPad as the management interface for your Cisco UCS system. Better yet, what a great excuse to get an iPad and put it on your expense account – “boss, I really need an iPad so I can manage our UCS system even better”

Tige Phillips (Cisco Systems Engineer) released his Simple iPhone Monitoring of UCS “in a lab”(SiMU Lab) tool to the iTunes App Store (Link to iTunes Store). Many of our Systems Engineers been testing the beta version for a while now and the feeling of power (and control) that it gives you when you are looking at your iPhone to control an entire UCS system is amazing! It is also a proof point that the XML interface of UCS Manager really is powerful. Can you do this with your legacy blade servers?

If you have a UCS system (and an iPhone/iPad) you should give this a try. Here is a summary of the supported features.
•    Assign blades to Service Profiles
•    Change descriptions of Blades and Service Profiles
•    Change Service Profile assignment
•    Save Username and Server Address
•    Turn blades off/on and reset them
•    Turn on both chassis and blade locator lights
•    Un-associate blades from Service Profiles
•    View information on Errors, Blades, PSUs, Server Profiles

NOTE: This is not an officially supported (via Cisco TAC) Cisco tool, but rather an excellent example of the flexibility of open interfaces available through the Cisco UCS. For more details on how 3rd-party partners or customers would interact with Cisco UCS in create ways, visit the UCS Manager -- Cisco Developer Community (requires Cisco.com login)