I am working on a project to automate VLAN pools used in ACI and UCS. When you are using a standard DVS (not AVS) with ACI, you define a pool of VLANs that the DVS will use when creating port groups. These port groups are created when you associate an EPG with a VMM domain.

In UCS, it is easy to create a VLAN pool with many members. On the LAN tab, under VLANs, you can specify a range of VLAN IDs. The sucky part comes when you want to add those VLAN IDs to a VNIC. This is the purpose of the script I want to build–to automate the addition of those VLAN IDs to the VNIC and add them to the ACI VLAN pool. The first step for me is figuring out how to add those VLANs to UCS via python.

There is an SDK named  UCSMSDK that you can install through pip. There is a function within this SDK that will take actions performed within UCSM and convert it to python code.

First I install the package.

sudo pip install ucsmsdk

I then run a simple script to log the UCSM actions. This script defines our login credentials, opens the GUI, then runs the convert to ucs python function.

from ucsmsdk.ucshandle import UcsHandle
from ucsmsdk.utils.ucsguilaunch import ucs_gui_launch
from ucsmsdk.utils.converttopython import convert_to_ucs_python
#
# login to UCS
handle = UcsHandle("10.1.1.200", 'admin', 'ucspassword')
handle.login()
#
# launch the GUI
ucs_gui_launch(handle)
#
#launch the convert to ucs python function
convert_to_ucs_python()

The terminal screen will log any actions and spit out the equivalent python code.

In this case I added vlan 2001 and 2002 to a vnic named Env7-gst-A. It converted those GUI actions to a python script. I can then take this code and convert it into a useful script to create VLAN IDs in bulk.

from ucsmsdk.mometa.vnic.VnicLanConnTempl import VnicLanConnTempl
from ucsmsdk.mometa.vnic.VnicEtherIf import VnicEtherIf

mo = VnicLanConnTempl(parent_mo_or_dn="org-root", templ_type="updating-template", nw_ctrl_policy_name="CDP-Enable", descr="", stats_policy_name="default", admin_cdn_name="", switch_id="A", pin_to_group_name="", mtu="9000", policy_owner="local", qos_policy_name="", ident_pool_name="Mac-Pool-Fabric-A", cdn_source="vnic-name", name="Env7-gst-A")
mo_1 = VnicEtherIf(parent_mo_or_dn=mo, default_net="no", name="PYTHON2001")
mo_2 = VnicEtherIf(parent_mo_or_dn=mo, default_net="no", name="PYTHON2002")
handle.add_mo(mo, True)

handle.commit()

Note: I use Ubuntu for most of my python work. I had to install Java to get this to work. This method will not work with the HTML5 GUI, only the Java version.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

These resources were used to research this process:

Installing Java in Ubuntu.

The UCSMSDK documentation.