OPCP - How to handle the NetBox rack elevation
Find out how the rack elevation is handled in NetBox for your OPCP infrastructure
Objective
NetBox is the reference tool for the physical and logical inventory of your OVHcloud On-Prem Cloud Platform (OPCP) infrastructure. Among its features, the rack elevation provides a visual, to-scale representation of a rack and the equipment installed in it.
This guide explains how the rack elevation is handled in NetBox and what information it gives you about your OPCP rack.
The NetBox inventory is automatically populated from the OPCP control plane; no manual action is required to add, position, or modify devices in the rack.
In OpenStack, a node corresponds to a physical server in the OPCP rack. In this guide, the term node therefore refers to a physical server.
Prerequisites
- Being an administrator of the OPCP infrastructure and having access to the administration interface
admin.dashboard. - Knowing how to access the NetBox inventory (see OPCP - How to see the node inventory).
Instructions
1. What is a rack elevation
In NetBox, a rack represents a physical equipment enclosure inside a data centre. Its capacity is measured in rack units (U) — a standard rack is typically between 42U and 48U high.
The rack elevation is a to-scale diagram of that rack. It shows, unit by unit, which device occupies which position, so you can understand the physical layout of your OPCP infrastructure without being on site.
2. Accessing the rack elevation in NetBox
- Log in to the administration URL
admin.dashboard. - Click NetBox. The rack elevation of your OPCP rack opens directly.
Alternative path: if you need to reach the elevation from another part of NetBox, open the DCIM section, select Racks, then select your OPCP rack to open its detail page and open the Elevation view.
3. Reading the elevation view
The elevation view conveys several pieces of information at a glance:
- Front and rear faces: the elevation can be displayed from the front or the rear of the rack, so you can see equipment that is mounted on either side.
- Device position and height: each device is drawn at the rack unit (U) where it is mounted and spans the number of units it physically occupies.
- Unit numbering: rack units are numbered along the side of the elevation. Depending on the rack configuration, numbering can run from the bottom up or from the top down.
- Role-based colouring: devices are coloured according to their role (for example servers versus network equipment), making it easy to distinguish equipment types.
- Free space: empty rack units are shown as available space, giving you a quick view of the remaining capacity.
4. How the rack elevation is generated
Under normal operation, you do not place nodes manually: their position in the rack elevation is generated automatically by the Ironic → NetBox synchronisation.
A position is determined as follows:
- During the synchronisation, each node's network cabling is read from Ironic — specifically the switch ports that the node is connected to.
- OVHcloud provides position templates that map a given set of switch-port connections to a specific rack unit (U). These templates are created by OVHcloud and depend on the rack type, which itself depends on how the platform was installed.
- When a template matching the rack type exists and the node's cabling matches one of its entries, the node is placed automatically at the corresponding rack unit. This automatic position takes precedence: it overwrites any manual change, and if the target unit is already occupied, the device currently there is moved out first.
The fallback is always manual positioning. If no position template matches the rack type — or if the rack has no rack type defined — the synchronisation does not change the position of the affected nodes. In that case, any position you set manually in NetBox is preserved and is never overwritten by the sync. You can then position the device yourself in the elevation view, and your change is kept on the next synchronisation.
Note that if a template does exist for the rack type but a node's cabling does not match any of its entries, the node is left without a position in the elevation. In this case, manual positioning does not help: any position you set is cleared again on the next synchronisation. The node can only be placed once its cabling matches a template entry.
5. What the rack elevation tells you
For an OPCP infrastructure, the rack elevation helps you to:
- Locate a node physically in the rack for on-site operations such as maintenance or cabling.
- Assess capacity by seeing which units are occupied and which are free.
- Map the physical and logical views together by cross-referencing a device shown in the elevation with its node inventory entry and its OpenStack/Ironic status.
To go further with the inventory and node states, see:
References
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