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Sites and Racks

Regions

Sites can be arranged geographically using regions. A region might represent a continent, country, city, campus, or other area depending on your use case. Regions can be nested recursively to construct a hierarchy. For example, you might define several country regions, and within each of those several state or city regions to which sites are assigned.

Site Groups

Like regions, site groups can be used to organize sites. Whereas regions are intended to provide geographic organization, site groups can be used to classify sites by role or function. Also like regions, site groups can be nested to form a hierarchy. Sites which belong to a child group are also considered to be members of any of its parent groups.

Sites

How you choose to employ sites when modeling your network may vary depending on the nature of your organization, but generally a site will equate to a building or campus. For example, a chain of banks might create a site to represent each of its branches, a site for its corporate headquarters, and two additional sites for its presence in two colocation facilities.

Each site must be assigned a unique name and may optionally be assigned to a region and/or tenant. The following operational statuses are available:

  • Planned

  • Staging

  • Active

  • Decommissioning

  • Retired

The site model also provides a facility ID field which can be used to annotate a facility ID (such as a datacenter name) associated with the site. Each site may also have an autonomous system (AS) number and time zone associated with it. (Time zones are provided by the pytz package.)

The site model also includes several fields for storing contact and address information as well as geolocation data (GPS coordinates).

Locations

Racks and devices can be grouped by location within a site. A location may represent a floor, room, cage, or similar organizational unit. Locations can be nested to form a hierarchy. For example, you may have floors within a site, and rooms within a floor.

The name and facility ID of each rack within a location must be unique. (Racks not assigned to the same location may have identical names and/or facility IDs.)

Racks

The rack model represents a physical two- or four-post equipment rack in which devices can be installed. Each rack must be assigned to a site, and may optionally be assigned to a location and/or tenant. Racks can also be organized by user-defined functional roles.

Rack height is measured in rack units (U); racks are commonly between 42U and 48U tall, but NetBox allows you to define racks of arbitrary height. A toggle is provided to indicate whether rack units are in ascending (from the ground up) or descending order.

Each rack is assigned a name and (optionally) a separate facility ID. This is helpful when leasing space in a data center your organization does not own: The facility will often assign a seemingly arbitrary ID to a rack (for example, "M204.313") whereas internally you refer to is simply as "R113." A unique serial number and asset tag may also be associated with each rack.

A rack must be designated as one of the following types:

  • 2-post frame

  • 4-post frame

  • 4-post cabinet

  • Wall-mounted frame

  • Wall-mounted cabinet

Similarly, each rack must be assigned an operational status, which is one of the following:

  • Reserved

  • Available

  • Planned

  • Active

  • Deprecated

Each rack has two faces (front and rear) on which devices can be mounted. Rail-to-rail width may be 10, 19, 21, or 23 inches. The outer width and depth of a rack or cabinet can also be annotated in millimeters or inches.

Rack Roles

Each rack can optionally be assigned a user-defined functional role. For example, you might designate a rack for compute or storage resources, or to house colocated customer devices. Rack roles are fully customizable and may be color-coded.

Rack Reservations

Users can reserve specific units within a rack for future use. An arbitrary set of units within a rack can be associated with a single reservation, but reservations cannot span multiple racks. A description is required for each reservation, reservations may optionally be associated with a specific tenant.