[racktables-users] Re: racktable features: vms, blades, rackoverview

I just noticed this post and thought I'd share how I decided to track vms, blades and rackoverviews. I create the real racks of 42 or 44 units and also create racks to represent the different VM hosts and Blade Chassis, lets call these virtual racks. Unit sizes will vary for these virtual racks based on how many guests or blades you can place in each + 1. You can then place the VM guests and Blades into the correct rack. You also place the real host object into the virtual rack as well that is the +1, and you also place that same real host into the real rack that it is mounted into. RackTables will allow you to select multiple rack locations for a single object. So here's the magic... when I browse to an object called c7000 it shows the real rack and its location as well as the virtual rack and all the blades in that chassis. If you browse to a blade, since the real chassis object is also mounted into the virtual rack you can easily navigate back to the real host with a click. So now you can keep information (serials, IPs...) about your VMhosts or Blade Chassis and also see all the populated guests/blades right from the object view. 
Example Virtual Rack names for VM/Blade/LPAR:
RackRow :: Rack(hostname) :: hostname and guests or Blades
HD-DatacenterName-LPAR :: p570-1 :: p570-1,LPAR1, LPAR2, LPAR3
HD-DatacenterName-VMware :: ESX001 :: ESX001,winvm001, winvm003
HD-DatacenterName-Blade :: c7000-1 :: c7000-1, blade1, blade2...
HD means High Density and it just keeps these type of virtual racks sorted together in the Rackspace view. 
Real Racks:
DC01 :: p570-1 units 1-16, ESX001 units 22 - 33
DC02 :: c7000-1 units 1-10
I hope that makes sense. Its actually easier to setup then it is to explain in an email. Oh, and you also should create tags to organize the different object types. VMware guest, VMware host, LPAR, IBMhost, Blade Chassis, Blade. 
Ernie

Von: racktables-users-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:racktables-users-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Im Auftrag von Luis Fernando 
Lacayo
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 25. März 2009 14:47
An: racktables-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Betreff: [racktables-users] Re: racktable features: vms, blades, rackoverview 



Hi Ronny,
Blades have been a concern for us a we have over 14 racks full of blades..
What we are doing is the we create mini racks. We have over 350 Dell 1955 and m600 blades, so we create 14 u rack for the 1955's and 20u rack for the m600. 

Our naming convention then takes over.
For rack BI-07, which is a 42u rack full of Dell 1955's we create 6 mini racks 
(14u).  Then we name the racks BI-07-01, BI-07-08, BI-07-15, BI-07-22,
BI-07-29, and BI-07-36.  The last part is U number of the bottom of the
enclosure. Now you ask, if that enclosure only has 10 blades, why a 14u mini 
rack, the other 4 are used for the Cisco 3032 switches.  It is not the
prettiest solution but it works for us.
Now if there was a way to put racks in racks... that would solve our problem, but I am so confident on the guys who are working on racktables that it is only 
a matter of time, before they come up with a workable solution......

thanks for the hard work guys..

Luis




On Wed, 2009-03-25 at 10:31 +0100, Ronny Stein wrote:

Hi,
we use racktables for our server rooms too. In the past we manage the overview 
with some excel sheets (>10!)
At the moment all our racks are filled in. But there are some features we 
missing. So we patched some values in racktables:
- To Manage virtual machines (we do it with the “hosted on” mod and 
some tag´s to see vmclient-vmhost)

-         To Manage blade servers (at this time no usable solution)
- Get a formatted printable output from the rack overview with some 
detail informations, like dell-tag and 1 manage ip. We patched the
interfaces.xx and rename the static-attributes to our values. It works but we 
must write some ip informations twice to racktables, not nice.
Some other users have also this problems. Perhaps it works in some future 
version?
At last Racktables is a great tool and we are definitely go from our old excel 
“solution” to racktables in the future.



Best regards



Ronny

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