Netbox as cabling plant manager

[xkilian]

We have an existing cabling database with over 200K connexions with a very large amount of fiber optic cables, patch panels, splice panels, etc. Can Netbox handle that number of connexions and is the cabling plant implementation fleshed out enough, especially for  the fiber optics portion:

- missing features

- missing data structures

- connexion creation workflow (especially for going through intermediate series of splicing/patch optical panels.)

- scalability issues

- navigation issues

- filtering issues

We have a good handle on the IPAM and some of the DCIM portion, but are exploring the cabling plant options.

Thanks for your feedback.

xkilian

[Torstein Thorsland Elvenes]

Looking for the same thing. Mabey there are other open source systems we can integrate with netbox for documenting OSP?

[Francois Mikus]

GE Smallworld seems to be one of the big commercial systems that can do OSP, but I am not sure how it would play out to integrate with Netbox for DCIM and inside plant. 

From an operations point of view having a single combined systems for DCIM, inside plant and outside plant would be ideal as you only model once your cabinets, H-frames, etc.And you can follow your connexions end-to-end. We are certainly exploring all possibilities.

At this point what I have found missing in Netbox is: (Correct me if I am wrong)

- Being able to document a fusion splice box, as there are no connectors. cable id X + colour X going to cable id Y+ colour Y

- Better handling of fiber interfaces that have multiple cables terminating on the same connector. In our current system you create two interfaces which will represent 1/1/1-TX, 1/1/1-RX or whatever the combination. In Netbox, I was hoping that there could be more intelligence associated with the connector to handle behind the scenes the two cables.. :-/

- Being able to manage conduit occupation. So based on a diameter it will know that it have an occupation X based on the diameters of all the cable types that can be used. Not a big feature, but useful. I will open an issue and see if there is any interest there, otherwise it may be possible using a plugin.

xkilian

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[Jeremy Stretch]

Just some thoughts from the perspective of a maintainer:

> Being able to document a fusion splice box

You can do this today using multi-position rear ports mapped to front ports. The canonical example is an MPO cable broken into six individual pairs, each of which can be connected to individual interfaces. I don't know how well this would work if you need to track individual strands, though.

> Better handling of fiber interfaces that have multiple cables terminating on the same connector.

NetBox necessarily takes a "network-first" view, and admittedly sometimes sacrifices scrupulous modeling of the physical infrastructure in favor of more efficient modeling of the logical overlay. For example, it would be incredibly painful if, to connect an MPO cable to a 40GE interface, I needed to first define each of the 12 strands within it. (It would also be incredibly inefficient to trace.) I believe this is why we have today tools that excel at modeling either the logical network or the underlying physical plant, but not both. If you do know of a tool that does both very well, I'd be interested in checking it out.

> Being able to manage conduit occupation

This one's just going to be out of scope for NetBox. I understand and appreciate the need; it's just not something that would fit well within the application.

Jeremy

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Jeremy Stretch
Sr. Network Automation Engineer
Network to Code, LLC

[Francois Mikus]

Thank you for the answers.

For conduit occupation, I can understand, we would probably look at doing a Netbox plugin which would have a database model for conduits, handle occupation calculations and add UI elements to assign cables to conduits.

I think this should be possible and would fit in with the expected use of the plugin architecture.

For modeling physical versus logical. Always a question of tradeoffs. We will have to try each of our use-cases to see if they can be modelled in Netbox, especially the fusion modelling with your suggestion.

At this point we are happy with what we see and have tested.

Though there is some grumbling on the pure DCIM end of the feature set when comparing to dedicated products like Struxureware or Device42:

Visualisation of the power connections(using an auto graphing library like mermaid of other), visualisation of what-if failure scenarios, what phase is an output port on a PDUs with 2 or 3 input phases, visual manipulation of device placement in racks.

I have to admit the power visualisation makes it nice to understand what is going on, as it is an important part of managing a datacenter and planning changes and outages. Once again, perhaps a plugin would be the place for this considering the Netbox philosophy.

Keep up the great work.

xkilian