Hey XCP-NG! How's my setup?
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Hey everyone!
I've been playing with IT for a long time, can't ever say I'm a professional of any sort but I do find myself enthusiastic about it. I started long ago with a cheap Google Search Appliance (Poweredge 2950) under my couch and just kept acquiring parts since then and eventually stuck it all into a rack.
XCP-NG has been a part of that journey for a long time and currently trying to practice diagram creation. I figured I'd started with a full summary reference diagram and break it down from there, but let me know how it looks! Either my diagram or the architecture itself!
This diagram includes 6 sections broken down into:
Home Logical Topology
Home Physical Topology (simple)
Colo (Virginia)
Hardware setup template
Home network equipment summary
Networking and VLANsThe diagrams cover my home architecture, and my off-site locations in a colo connected via S2S VPN.
Appreciate it everyone!
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Ummm... Your documentation sure makes a lot of us jealous!
Was that just a layout program like draw.io, or are you using something like Netbox for that work?
I'm starting on GLPI to handle more than just flow paths going forward, need to track serial numbers, date of purchase, maybe installed software as I go forward. A project for the summer.
So there might be two other things to look into if you get bored.
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I appreciate that! I used draw.io to create this and although I've made quite a few diagrams as a prior teacher, I don't quite know any standards so I do my best to present it as built.
I've tried GLPI before and I did enjoy it, I also used Snipe-IT alongside a Dymo label printer to great success. I didn't quite keep up on that documentation sadly and most of my equipment details/warranty now fall under Grocy as I'm in that program more than others.
I tend to browse through the Awesome opensource Self-hosted list and see what I can put together and how I can improve. I do use a lot of this in my house, and contains my router now so I'm outta luck if it goes down lol.
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Couldn't help myself, noticed a few errors and thought of a few items to throw in the diagram lol.
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Your doc is probably better than what you can find in 90% of the companies we worked with, including ourselves
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Documentation is the first thing to get pushed to the back burner, same in my area, same in my larger IT department. Never enough time to document things correctly.
I need to get going with Netbox and see if I can make this speed up what I want to document.
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olivierlambert I appreciate that! You guys have been foundational in my learning experience with XCP-NG at the core. I'm essentially opensource style or BSD licensing in my setup and I've found everything you all do to be well documented and performance is outstanding from what I can push.
It helps to know this is a good representation! This was the hopeful start to creating more diagrams and trying to setup deep dives of each section; delving into abstraction layers and displaying on a personal website as a type of portfolio addition to a resume. Got caught up in layoffs recently, so as the search goes I've tried to improve and refine what I do have on hand.
It's not the most modern of hardware as It's really been a long process, but I've tried to eek out as much performance and variety as I could. Always learning, sometime brutally lol.
As I create more, I keep going back and updating this one.
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Greg_E Netbox does an amazing job and helps you make connections. I do have one setup but not listed here, however I don't have it fully operational at this moment. Been running some devs on a true one pane of glass solution such as Grafana or alternatives and how it feeds in. Haven't quite settled on anything though.
For the diagram above, generally I'll start off with the physical topology and I'll make a list of the hops it would take to get somewhere on the network until I reach an ending point, usually the longest route first. Then just create the basic flowchart, create my branches as necessary.
The format of the diagram is made up of the container shapes in either horizontal or vertical title, and I change the colors. I try to start with warmer or neutral colors at the background container and cooler colors in the foreground. Something I learned during early days of HTML/CSS.
The icon packs I used were Cisco, but had overlap from Rack, CAE and Citrix icon packs
