Netbox Cabling

hmm [Music] it's time to put down the coffee get some cables connected [Music] hey guys back in the data center coming you to just just show a picture right as you get into netbox a lot of people step into it because they're allured by the ip address management and then they discover oh i can do vlans and then they discover oh i can actually document what equipment is where and and and then oh my gosh and then i can document what's connected to what and what powers what and it's almost like oh and and pretty soon people are like this is not just something where i can document what i p addresses are being used this is something that is a big project and and can have a lot of valuable stuff and let me let me tell you right now as we're starting to get into the connections that power your system right how to connect cables together don't i'm not i'm not going to say it this way because i i realize everybody's different everybody's got only so much time in a day right but don't under underplay don't don't devalue is is what i'm trying to say the value that there is in documenting what's connected to what it does it does a couple things one is the obvious you can actually go in and say oh okay i've got i've got you know this port right here that that connects down to that server so if i have a problem with that server i know exactly where to go without you know trying i mean can you imagine trying to to fish cables through here and figure out what's connected to what it's like no way i'd much rather just be like oh yeah it's that port right there click let me move it to a different interface so there's there's the obvious value there right but the second thing that happens when you document your cabling inside of netbox is you become a whole lot more disciplined because there's gonna be there's gonna be some time that it takes to get you putting in there what's connected to what and so you're to be far more protective far more proactive with with ensuring that these cables stay the way they are and that any change that happens is one that's planned and not done haphazardly the way in that box does cabling it's interesting it's not counter-intuitive it's it's just different in the way that it approaches it and that's why i called this section connecting netbox cables to strategies for cabling so let me let me actually start off by just bringing up netbox into the screen here we go because a lot of people when they think okay it's time to connect the cables they'll come over here to connections cables click on that and then sure enough it's blank there's no button to add and that's because this section right here is a report of the cables that are connected you actually connect the cables to show the device connections from the devices themselves matter of fact like i said there are two strategies for cabling so let's look at the first one the first strategy as i choke uh is to connect the devices directly this is really useful when you have you know a rack of equipment there's your there's your router sitting right there and you're plugging it straight into the switch below or there's a switch up here at the top of the rack and that comes over here to another top of the rack switch and you have those devices connected directly together that's done simply by going into netbox let me bring this up right here i'm going to start back at the rack kind of focus in right there there's our mdf rack one let's say that i want to connect my router 01 uh to to a couple things let's actually use this as a little demonstration let's let's say here let me uh let me grab my pen and go with a different color let's say that we actually have a cable modem mounted on the wall right um the reason i'm saying that is it's not actually in the rack it doesn't consume a use so i'm not going to add it to there but that plugs into the ethernet zero port on my router and then the ethernet one port plugs directly down here to uh to to switch one right and we'll just say uh on gigabit zero slash one on there right so everybody got got what we're connected this is the first probably the easiest connection types that's there so let me hide my chicken scratch for just a minute and let's do it so first thing i want to do is i want to add that cable modem it actually is going to show up here as a non-racked device but to do that you can see if i click on add it's going to ask me for a device role and a device type so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back here to the devices and let's create a device role and i'm just going to name this role peripheral device let's add this in we'll call it peripheral hopefully i've spelled that right device because i think we can use it for a lot of things i'm going to use the color of purple let's go right there how about purple just so it stands out in the list not a vmworld i'll click on create we've now got the role available to us and now i'm going to go and add before i add the device type because it's going to ask me for a manufacturer let's just call let's create a generic manufacturer called external vendor right you'll see why in just a second because i mean you guys know what i'm talking about when i'm talking about cable modems dsl modems you know other stuff that plugs in that's just random stuff that ends up in the id room somehow that's where external vendor comes in handy right so now i'm going to come down here and go to the device type the type of device that i'm going to add in is going to be this external vendor model let's just say cable dsl modem all right we'll use one for for both i'm gonna change the rack height to zero it's not full depth this is an option you can type that in there uh which allows you to pretty much not consume rackspace matter of fact it'll prevent you from consuming rack space uh so so be careful when you do that watch watch what i'm going to do now so i've added this in and actually before i go any further to this device i'm going to add an interface we'll just call it eth0 right this will be let's just make it a one gigabit per second port right so that way i have a device it has an ethernet port so i can represent things okay let's go add that to our rack so i'm going to click on racks uh i'll jump back here man this whole time it's just slightly bent off there we go i'm going to go back to the mdf rack and instead of putting it in here matter of fact let's let's just pretend that i wanted to add it in here i'm going to say i want to add uh let's let's say my peripheral device and it'll be my cable modem right click on create watch what happens i was like wait it worked no it actually didn't work it says hey lowest number it's occupied says a u0 device type cannot be assigned to a rack position so it actually has some error checking put in there to to prevent that so i'm going to go to the non-rack device now i can add that in and say the device type is a cable modem uh peripheral device right oh i have two of them i must add it in beforehand so i'll click on that click on create and now i've got that cable modem in the list you can see eth0 is available but now let's get back to our original goal here i've got the mdf rack my goal was to show uh if i can scroll down in here it was to show that this guy right there the rt01 was connected to the ethernet zero interface of this guy and and plugged into the eth0 on the cable modem itself so i'm going to go to rto1 and i could do this from the cable modem as well but right here are the interfaces and remember those show up because of the device type that i created i added those to the template i'm going to scroll over here to the right and click on this double arrow connection right it says what do you want to connect interface front port rear part circuit termination well i'm going to talk about this in just a second for now i'm just going to say i'm going to connect the interface and now it's saying okay what's it connected to i'm going to click on that'll be as i drop down in the list device of cable dsl modem right interface on there eth0 that's the one that i created right now if i wanted to i could get in and and say this is you know what kind of cabling it is you know whether it's dac you know what kind of so there's a lot of stuff that i could add to this i could even add a color of cable if i wanted it to stand out in the list same color options but for now i'm just going to click on connect and now i've created my first physical connection right i can now come down here and see that e0 is connected to the cable dsl modem now if i jump back to netbox you notice that right here i have cables click on that and sure enough i see my first cable connection that's that's placed right here over here on the right notice all of these these filters that i can put in because you can imagine in a production environment it's not going to take too long for this cabling to fill up with tons of cables if you're using it as you should so using these filters to say well show me you know this specific rack show me the specific color ah show me the specific device this is cool do you see what it you see what's possible as you do this this is more of a reporting tool than it is anything else so let's let's get back to the the other goal right click on this let me bring my scribbles back into the picture scroll down we're right about there so the ethernet 1 port on the rto1 needs to connect to gigabit 0-1 on the switch and i think you guys have the idea of this right click on this right here ethernet 1 that'll be my internal connection oop click the wrong spot let's click on connect interface we're going to go to sw01 and again the interface from the device type are added right there i could put the length of cable everything is is able to be documented right here but i'll click on connect bottom we now have two cable connections and now we've got this in in place right so where we can zoom in and actually see our cable map slowly being built through netbox this is cool now i want to talk about the synap the sneken the second type of cabling connection that you can have and that is through a patch panel netbox can get some serious through documentation let me come back to the slide and show you what i'm talking about this is the simple way direct connection between devices and a lot of data centers this is all you have but as the data center gets bigger and bigger you might end up with things that are like this where you actually have device connections that come not direct whoa man i got a big big pin there hang on let me clear that off device connections that go from the device not directly to the other device it actually comes into a patch panel and if you haven't seen a patch panel before you you can you can know that patch panels uh usually are are simple like this where you've got port one on the on the front that connects to port one on the back and port two on the front that connects to port two on the back uh but sometimes you might end up with not so simple uh uh cables like this where in you can have a patch panel where you have a whole bunch of of ports on the back that connect to a single port on the front either way netbox is geared to handle it right this is done through front and rear ports the first thing we have to do if we're going to connect this so let me let me um let me first off show a description let's let's say uh come back to my rack right here let's say that i have uh i have a connection coming uh like this and i've got i've got switch one that actually goes up here to the front of the patch panel right so that'll come in on let's just say front port 24 and i'm noting this for a reason right on the back side of that maybe maybe on the rear maybe we've got some keystone jacks maybe it's a punch down it doesn't really matter on the back side i'm going to have the rear port 24 connected to the back side of the rear port 24 up here and maybe that comes out of the front port and then comes back down here to switch two now uh 20 let's just let's just keep it 24 the whole way so i don't get lost right now you might be sitting like you're like why would you do something like that jeremy in this case it's just for the demonstration usually if you're going to do something like that you're going to go into the patch panel that then fishes off to some other rack right and then in that rack it comes into another patch panel and then comes down you see where i'm going with this right you would unless you're a a sadist or something you wouldn't you wouldn't come in here and do this to yourself within one rack but nonetheless we'll use this for our demonstration the first thing that we need to do is modify our patch panels because one thing i didn't do when i first created them as in created the device type is add front and rear ports to them you'll also see one of the things that you'll want to do and actually i'll even do that yeah i might as well do that right now i'm going to add a name to it i'm just going to call this uh 2u patch panel bottom right and you'll see why i'm doing this in just a second because right if we if we weren't documenting front and rear ports then then we wouldn't really have to worry about the names because they were essentially furniture they're invisible to us right to you patch panel top right so that way we know which one is which now if i come back and look at my rack now i can see okay this is the patch panel at the top this is a patch panel at the bottom okay that you'll see why that's relevant in just a second now i'm going to go in to both of those patch panels and when i add the components now normally normally you would have done this in the device type so when you created these patch panel the actual devices all of these would have followed it but since we didn't do that i'm going to go to the patch panel itself and then click on add components and i'm going to add the rear ports first and then you'll see why i'm doing this in in just a second so i'll put uh rp bra let's do brace 1 through 48 right i'm going to create 48 rear ports because it's a 2u patch panel right saying what type of you know what type of um uh cabling are you using and this is where you would go you know eight position eight contact or ten punch down block you know bnc you have all the options of cable types and how many positions you know if you're doing something crazy like that that cable i showed you with the mpo fiber cable then then uh then you can actually have more than one front port wrap map to a rear port i should say more rear ports mapped to a front port right so we're not going to do that i'm just going to create these rear ports right now and you can see shoot i now have a ton of rear ports on here now i'm going to add in the front ports and i'll call it fp brace 1 through 48 closed brace and it says what okay line them up to the rear ports i'm just going to select them all right which is just going to do a one-to-one mapping of uh of the the front to rear all the way through right so i'll click on create and now we are back here with all the the uh front ports lined up to the rear ports front port 23 lined up to rear port 23 et cetera et cetera see how that that goes all the way down i'm going to do that to the other patch panel this top patch panel add components start with the rear ports and again we'll name them the same thing 1 through 48 close brace create and then we will add in the front ports fp brace 1 through 48 close brace we'll select all the rear ports create and now they are all lined up okay we've now added those to our patch panels and the reason i didn't show you that when i was showing you adding interfaces way back is i was trying to keep it to the core three i was like we'll talk about this one later because it can be kind of confusing if you haven't seen that before now let's get back to our scenario i'm going to go back here to the racks and go to the mdf rack and we had said hang on let me get my chicken scratch here and line it back up again we had said that switch there we go switch one how did i do this something like that uh switch one was going to go i'm not i'm totally throwing myself off here there we go switch one was going into the bottom patch panel front port 24 which has the rear port connected to the top patch panel which then has the front port connected down to switch two i actually didn't even say one air fit let's just say port 24 for everything right so so if i'm wanting to do that what i need to do hang on let me hide this i'm gonna go to the switch one and i'm gonna say okay port 24. so gigabit ethernet 24 is going to connect to the front port ah now i see it okay to the front port of the bottom and now do you see why i assigned the names to the patch panel if you don't it just says to you patch panel and you don't know which one you're picking so i'm going to say i'm going to go to the bottom right of of that patch panel i'm going to connect it to front port 24 connect we now have our cable connected now i'm going to go back here and say okay the patch panel bottom i'm going to go to the rear panel 24 connect that guy to the rear panel of the top port 24. oh man you see where drawing this out on paper can really help okay good okay and then so now now i can go i could either go to the to the top patch panel or i could come down here to switch three which we were wanting to connect it in right so i'll go to switch three might as well and say gigabit ethernet 24 right here is connected to the front port of the top panel from port 24. i'm glad we just kept it 24 the whole way through otherwise you need a spreadsheet or something to keep all of this stuff straight that is now the second way as i as i come back here and look at the cables the second way that i can notate what is connected to what but this time instead of just saying what's connected to what i can say through what where i can show it coming in to the to the uh the front port of the patch panel out the rear port to another rear port and through the front port and and you can imagine i mean if there's more and more patch panels all the way through you could take this to the cows come home right to make sure that you have that cleanly documented all the way through the network um but it definitely encourages you to have a clean network uh to keep those cable paths from becoming too complex so two methods the simple way and then including patch panels if you if you want to do that not all organizations will do that what i'd like you to do before you before you leave this video is i'd like you to go to your netbox instance and first off connect create cabled connection between two devices this is the simple way right create a cable connection between two devices hopefully it mirrors what you actually have running but if not just get the experience of doing that then do the second way add a front port and a rear port to a patch panel and create a full cable path moving from device to patch panel to patch panel to device now you could also have if you've ever seen those patch panels that are just literally an empty plate with keystone jacks all the way through you could have something that comes into you know device to the rear port to the front port to the device you don't have to have two patch panels in that case and if you'd like to do that feel free to do it the main thing i want you to do is get this experience because otherwise it'll get scrambled in your mind and you'll go to do it in production it's going to be like i can't remember how to do it right do it once it sticks forever it's that simple

Channel: Viatto

Views: 27,350

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Id: b-H-tSlZmZA

Length: 19min 30sec (1170 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 28 2021