The first part about setting up the lab in general is deploying the OVA template you have downloaded from the Cisco website. Also ensure that you have Java Runtime Environment 1.6 or higher installed. This guide makes the assumption you know enough about VMWare to deploy an OVA/F on your own. I downloaded the 3.0.2cPE1 from https://communities.cisco.com/docs/DOC-57526.

This usually only takes a minute or two.

Once deployed you will probably notice the Cisco UCS Platform Emulator runs on top of CentOS, I thought this was kind of cool. It takes a good minute or two for it to start up so be patient. Once it has finished booting if you have DHCP enabled on your lab, it will output an IP address you can connect to the web console on. In my case this is 192.168.177.212 (as seen below).

At this point you have deployed the OVA and you are ready to experiment. You can now hit the web console though the IP address, it will automatically forward you to the /config page.

The next part is clicking on the Launch UCS Manager, it may give you some warnings like the one shown below, it is safe to click Run.

In a moment it should prompt you for credentials, use the ones that were in the VMWare console for the virtual machine (ucspe).

The first time you run this, it will prompt you if you want to opt into the call in feature where it sends statistics back to Cisco. I opted out, but you can opt in if you would like.

At this point you should see something like the below screenshot, you are done with getting the OVA deployed and should see two servers in the chassis.

In the next tutorial I will cover the creation of server pools, UUID pools, MAC pools, and WWN pools.