Did a major start on getting some cable management done in the home computer room. I have been wanting to start some cable management in the computer room for a very long time but wanted to get the hardware situation handled first.
Now that the C7000 blade chassis is pretty much set with my Virtual Connect networks to external LAN switches it was a good time to start the cable management process. There’s still much to do but I wanted to make sure I had a workable foundation.
I gathered some cable panduit and old speaker\cable mounts I have literally been packing around for almost 20 years. The speaker\cable mounts are in original boxes from a pallet I bought at an auction long ago. I am so glad didn’t sell all of them now!
I moved cables on one network then moved to the next network starting with my busiest network. I monitored and checked connectivity after each cable movement noting which systems would be affected each time before moving the cable, minimizing troubleshooting later.
I migrated my VM’s to my main servers on the bl460c Gen8 blades moved the cables connected to my backup hypervisors and then migrated the VM’s to my backup systems once I started moving the 10gbe fiber cables. Migrating servers wasn’t completely necessary since I have multi-paths setup over the various networks to all storage and hypervisors but did that anyway
I moved the rj45 gigabit connections first and then my 10gbe connections. The gigabit connections are mainly my IPMI connections on my FreeNAS storage and backup XCP-NG hypervisors.
This was like an all day untangling fishing line type of deal that needed to be done. Not the fun part of computers but it will make tracing cables for troubleshooting, moving equipment around faster and easier. Cleaning up the back helps keep cables out of the way in case I need to replace modules in the HPE C7000 blade chassis.
I did a final inspection of my networking logging into the Virtual Connect, my managed switches and made sure I could access my applications like websites, music streaming site, virtual systems, CCTV, Plex media servers, XCP-NG systems, FreeNAS etc..
Here’s a before and after in the front. Still not pretty but much easier to manage. I also have a bit of multimedia cables in the mix.
The bottom of the rack is the HPE C7000, then Liebert UPS’, then my 2 FreeNAS storage servers using Supermicro 2u storage chassis’s, then backup Dell XCP-NG hypervisors, then Trendnet 16 port KVM, then my 3 Mikrotik switches, then Linksys and Netgear gigabit switches, finally the cable panduits and cable mounts.
