GUI-Based Asset-Tracking Tools For a Datacenter? 113
toruonu writes "How do you keep track of what's in your datacenter, where it is, what it's connected to and what is it doing right now? I mean I have built a datacenter from scratch over the years and I have machines from Sun, IBM, HP, Supermicro. I have machines that are simple workernodes and machines that are heavy grade storage consolidation machines. Then there are tens of switches, some for interconnect, some for management and don't get me started on the UPSs etc. So how does one keep any kind of decent track of such a system as the current form of twiki pages with various tables just doesn't cut it anymore and I'm looking for a freeware solution that could actually show me a visual representation of the various nodes in the racks, their connections and dependencies. Just to give a simple example, if I'm going to disconnect UPS #3 right now and swap switch #5, which machines should I even consider taking offline?" (The best-looking such system I've seen was being used at OSCON at a display booth for the Open Source Lab, and I think it was home-grown. Anyone who can shed light on that system?)
Advanced mind maping software? (Score:5, Informative)
Might be close enough, I guess...since that's essentially what you want to do, map some aspects of the "electronic mind" that's under your care.
Wikipedia seems to hava a list perfectly adequate as a starting point
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mind_mapping_software [wikipedia.org]
Racktables (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure if it meets his needs exactly, but I've used http://racktables.org/ [racktables.org] in the past and it's worked well for keeping track of a small-ish datacenter (about 400 sqft with 7 full size racks and a couple dozen servers).
Bright Computing Cluster Manager (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.brightcomputing.com/ [brightcomputing.com]
Rackview (Score:2, Informative)
The system used to visualize the OSUOSL lab is called Rackview.
http://rackview.sourceforge.net/
Nagios? Never heard of OpenNMS, I take it (Score:5, Informative)
It does automated network scanning for assets, asset tracking, alerts and notifications, SNMP data collection, reporting, and yes, it has a .svg based network mapper that you can customize with your own graphics. It comes with MIBS for hundreds of devices, but you can easily import your own MIBS for unsupported devices. It's open source, of course. Nagios is just a bunch of disassembled parts. You have to wire it together for each device. Adding new devices is a pain: you have to install the Nagios monitors on each new device. Nagios does not speak SNMP! OpenNMS does speak SNMP, and it will autoscan networks for devices, and devices for capabilities. Adding thousands of devices at a time is a snap. Plus, OpenNMS uses a modular architecture that scales well. We use it on a network consisting of over 2,000 clients at 50 offices, 30 IBM Blade servers hosting hundreds of VMWare virtual hosts, and innumerable network devices, printers, etc.
What the OSUOSL uses and beyond (Score:4, Informative)
The project you saw at OSCON was called RAIV (Rack And Inventory Viewer). Unfortunately it ran into a dead-end and is currently vapor-ware. Currently we're using an internal CakePHP webapp for basic inventory and customer tracking, but its very buggy and lacks many features.
We are in the midst of working on a completely new project that will cover many of the problems mentioned in this article and beyond. Think of it like an open source datacenter management webapp and backend. Its still in the planning stages, but the intent is to have a plugin based system where you can use the inventory plugin, DNS/DHCP plugin (to replace maintain), virtualization management (deployment and console access), etc all in one interface. The idea is to create an admin interface and a customer interface so that they can access and see information about their environment. We're far from having a demoed project but we hope to have something soon.
Re:What the OSUOSL uses and beyond (Score:2, Informative)
RAIV wasn't graphical at all, so you must be thinking of the virtual server room tour we put together 2 years ago.
The code for that is here: http://git.osuosl.org/?p=rackview.git [osuosl.org]
however theres no documentation, and likely doesn't work with the latest version of openlaszlo. It wasn't tied into our inventory system at all. I manually merged several different sources into a single xml file. We've since moved away from laszlo in favor of html+css+javascript+svg. Eventually we might rewrite this, but have no concrete plans right now.