Physical server diagrams….what are they? Physical server rack diagrams show how the equipment on the rack, such as servers, are organized and connected. Having these diagrams on deck helps take the guesswork out of finding out how network devices are connected. They also provide you with the insights you need to cut costs, reduce power expenditures by oversubscribing racks, and more.
Software, such as netTerrain (which we’ll use as an example in this blog) helps you create beautiful diagrams of the your entire infrastructure, including your physical servers. Need to document and visualize your physical or virtual servers, or your SaaS instances with network diagrams? Server diagrams make it easy!
For your traditional rack and stack equipment inside a data center, netTerrain lets you easily, and quickly, search for your server in the catalog: just drag and drop it into the rack and it snaps in place. The key metrics of your server space, nameplate power, and weight availability are included in the server information for any device: all of this information helps with other aspects of your network and data center capacity planning!
Rack Mount Example in netTerrain
Are server diagrams hard to make in IT documentation software like netTerrain? It depends on which software you use, but in netTerrain, placing equipment inside of a server rack diagram is simple. Just import the floor plan of your choice (upload your own of your data center/telecom room) or use netTerrain’s grid feature that lets you snap racks into the grid. Next, drag and drop your rack (choose from hundreds of options in the catalog, make your own in seconds, or have us make it for you). Finally, just drag and drop your network devices into the rack and you’re done.
Making connections from servers to patch panel? Easy peasy. Click on the port(s) that you want to connect from and click on the ports on say the patch panel and connect. You can do the same on the device level and rack level too. One note — because network discovery doesn’t normally discover patch panels (unless you have smart patch panels) you will need to depict how the cabling flows between pieces of equipment inside the rack.
VMware Discovery Example in netTerrain
For virtual servers, place your ESXi server into the network rack and run the netTerrain Collector, to view all your VM hosts and images. Easily determine how many virtual machines you have, where they are, what they’re doing, and who owns them.
For your Cloud deployments (such as AWS), you can create, and view diagrams of a production or dev diagram. With the netTerrain Collector, you can start to understand the relationships, the security groups, the servers, the EC2 instances, see if there are snapshots, images, and so on — and see it all in just one view!
AWS Visualization Example in netTerrain
You can enter as many details as you’d like for any object in netTerrain, as well as items that are not discovered. Items that help with IT Asset Management, such as if the server is under warranty, under maintenance contract, cost, owner of equipment, which customer a server supports, etc.).
If you’d like to learn how netTerrain can help you manage your infrastructure, including with physical server diagrams, click here to get a free trial.