[racktables-users] Re: Racktables and inventories
- From: Denis Ovsienko <pilot@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: racktables-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:03:12 +0300
> I've got a few high level questions about how people use racktables (I
> want to make sure that we're not trying to apply the wrong tool to the
> problem). Background - we've got over 100 racks spread over a number
> of machine rooms. At the moment we don't have a single inventory
> system tracking all of this and we certainly don't have anything which
> records connections at the level racktables can.
>
> Could/should we use racktables as an asset register (something that we
> can use to generate the list of all our servers/storage with
> locations, values etc)? I'm pretty sure that racktables _can_ do
> this, I'm just not sure if it's the right tool. What do other people
> do? Is racktables the primary source of information about your estate
> or do you import information from another system? If you do use
> something else as the primary data source I'd be very interested to
> hear recommendations.
Hello, Paul.
The answer is neither "yes" nor "no". Let me give a couple of
recommendations. Many assets management systems are implemented as a
tree (which represents the enterprise), holding the assets.
First, it's already possible to assign stuff to such a tree by the mean
of tags. You build a tree, you tag assets. Then you can quickly pick
everything for the given "location" and grant some permissions based on
that tags. It's not exactly the solution you are asking for, but it
could work for your specific task, it's already implemented and it
works. It's simple to try and figure out.
Then, a more specialized approach has been discussed and even promised
to be implemented: https://racktables.org/trac/wiki/RackPlan
I've got most of important details designed, but I don't possess the
required amount of spare time currently to start coding with
confidence. To be realistic, I'd expect the RackPlan to be implemented
during one of the long winter evenings this year. There's my personal
interest in getting the feature done finally, so if it's not a matter
of urgency for you, just wait till the time comes.
And finally, there's always a place for a contributing developer in the
project, it's Open Source.
--
Denis Ovsienko
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