Rackview Design

This tool was developed by the Open Source Development Lab to assist in managing and visualizing the computer equipment in its data center. OSDL provides a range of equipment for use by open source projects for testing of Linux software, and periodically needs to add or reconfigure the racks to meet new needs. A tool to help manage and track this information dynamically was needed, and was given priority to developing it when OSDL moved into new facilities and a new data center needed to be designed.

It is hoped that this tool will be directly useful to others wishing to visualize their data center layouts. But for those who wish or need to customize it further, this document provides tips and explanations of some of the tools internals and assumptions.

host- An item that has its location determined relative to a position in a rack or, if not rack mounted, its location in a building.

component- An item that has its location determined relative to a host

rack - a metal housing for hosts with vertically stacked mounting slots spaced a standard distance (measured in Us) apart.

frame - a set of one or more racks placed side-by-side.

Rackview is implemented as a Perl module named Eidetic::Racks. This encapsulates the logic required to collect and process the machine info for the racks and to generate HTML for displaying those racks. In general you do this by creating a new Eidetic::Rack object and then calling its toHtml() routine.

The HTML produced by Eidetic::Racks includes no header, footer, navigation, or any other such page structures. It is expected that these things are to be provided by higher level systems. For instance, a rackview.cgi script is included that adds in the HEAD, TITLE, BODY, etc. A commandline tool 'erackview' is also provided; this returns the raw output from toHtml; it is expected that the user would use this tool in conjuction with a templating system or else just 'cat' a header.inc and footer.inc onto it, as desired.

This section documents and explains the available fields in the configuration file.

search_order - This parameter allows control over where rackview should find its data. Allowed values are 'dat' and/or 'db'. It is possible to list both, comma-separated; the first listed will be searched first, and if no valid data is found (e.g., if the database is down), the next will be used.

db_brand - The type of database to use. Currently only 'mysql' is supported.

db_name - The name given to the database.

db_host - The hostname or IP address of the machine serving the database

db_user - The database username that rackview should use to access the data. There is no reason to give more than read-only access to rackview.

db_pass - A password for controlling access to the database. Leaving it blank is permitted. Note that if you specify a password, you may want to tighten down access permissions to the config file.

dat_file - If data is to be loaded from a data file instead of the database, specify the filename for that data with this parameter.

host_viewer - If specified, rackview will construct a URL based on the value of this parameter for the host images. The tag will be replaced by the ID number of the host as appropriate. One could use this to hook into an hardware inventory database using CGI parameters, for example, or could set up a series of static html files for the hosts.

rack_heat - Include display of heat information for rack. 1 to enable, 0 to disable.

frame_heat - Include display of heat information for entire frame. 1 to enable, 0 to disable.

heat - Report all heat info. 1 to enable, 0 to disable.

warn - Include display of warnings about database issues. 1 to enable, 0 to disable.

alpha - Report hosts in alphabetical order with U locations. 1 to enable, 0 to disable.

Eidetic::Rack can load its data either from a database or a file. The latter is mainly provided as a means to get the tool up and running quickly, for evaluation purposes; the principle intent of this tool is to be used in conjunction with a database, so that the information can be provided dynamically.

Eidetic::Racks utilizes Eidetic::Database to interact with mysql. Look at create_table_hosts.sql and create_table_host_types.sql in the sql/ directory to see the table schemas. Several fields are required in order for rackview to function; the remainder are optional and can be modified or removed as desired. The required fields are as follows:

host_type table

uid

rsf

descriptor

Size_in_rack_u

Max_btus

Brand

Brand_model_name

Cooling_tons_max
host table

uid

rsf

descriptor           The hostname of the machine
Rack_number          The ID number for the rack

Host_type_uid        

U_count_from_bottom

These two tables present a class/instance type of relationship. Any two hosts that share the same host_type are the same brand model number. In theory, the only differences would be the serial numbers and locational positions.

For data source flexibility, rackview allows loading its data from a flatfile. The file must contain a valid perl data structure, such as generated by Data::Dumper. This is loaded into rackview via a `do` command.

Note that for simplicity the class/instance distinction between host and host_type is ignored when loading from a file.

Each rack is drawn as a separate table, with positioning held together using images, including an invisible 'blank.gif'. All of the racks are nested inside a parent table.

The individual host images are drawn using the GD::Image graphics library. This is done in the draw_host_png() routine of Eidetic::Racks.

Additional information about the hosts is displayed at the bottom of the page.

If you'd like to have a U Ruler displayed on the left & right of the display, use the CGI parameter 'umarks=1' in the URL string.

The principle motivation behind rackview was to assist the Open Source Development Lab in better organizing its new lab layout and providing its associates with an online interactive means of interacting with the equipment. Some of the 'interesting' parts of this work are provided with rackview as an example, which you are free to reuse under the terms of the GPL.

To provide a top level view of the racks and show how they're laid out in our data center, a top-down image is used. Any drawing application able to emit images as GIF or PNG would be suitable; the example was drawn using GNOME's open source 2D scalable vector graphics drawing application, 'Sodipodi'. This can be obtained from http://sodipodi.sf.net. The PNG was generated by taking a screenshot using GIMP and cropping it to the appropriate size.

Integration of the PNG with rackview is done by representing the PNG as an imagemap. Different areas of the image are turned into 'hot spots' that can be clicked on. The URL for the anchor is constructed with the appropriate parameters to cause rackview.cgi to display those racks. For example:

usemap="#top_view_map" border="0">

href="http://localhost/cgi-bin/rackview.cgi?rack_ids=00,001&umarks=1"
onMouseOver="self.status='Frame 00, racks 000-001'; return true"
onMouseOut="self.status=''; return true">

...

This causes a rectangular shaped area of the top_view.png specified by the top left corner 180,160 and lower right corner 200,225 to become a clickable region that leads to the URL indicated by the href. The onMouseOver and onMouseOut properties are Javascript snippets that get executed when the user hovers the mouse cursor over the area.