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Racks and placement

A rack is a frame of numbered units (U) in a site, optionally in a location inside it (a row, hall or cage). An asset is placed in a rack at a position — the lowest unit it occupies — on the rack's front or rear face. A NetBox rack, rack role, rack type and rack reservation map onto these one to one.

Maintain racks

Settings → Organization → Racks lists every rack with its site and location, role, status, utilisation and the number of devices in it. Tenant admins (the dcim.manage permission) can:

  • Create a rack: a name (unique within its site and location), the site, an optional location of that site, a role, a status (active, planned, reserved, available, deprecated), its height (1–100 U, default 42), its starting unit (default 1), whether its units are numbered top-down, its width, and its facility ID, serial and asset tag.
  • Pick a rack type — a model of rack — and the rack copies the type's height, numbering, width and dimensions when you save.
  • Edit a rack. Its dialog has a Changes tab (who changed what, when) and its journal. A rack cannot be made shorter than the devices in it reach. Moving a rack to another site or location moves its devices with it.
  • Reserve units on the rack's Reservations tab: the units (1-2, 7) and who or what they are held for. Reserved units cannot overlap another reservation or a device.
  • Delete a rack: its reservations go with it, and its devices leave the rack and stay in the site.

Five rack roles are provided — compute, network, storage, patching and power — and you can add your own. A rack type that a rack uses cannot be deleted; deleting a role you added clears it from its racks.

Place an asset

The asset page's Placement card shows Site › Location › Rack › U · Face. Place in a rack (or Edit placement) opens a dialog: choose the site, optionally the location (it narrows the racks), the rack, the position (in half units) and the face. The asset moves to the rack's site and location. Remove from rack takes it out; it stays in the site.

The placement rules:

  • A device occupies its device type's height from its position upward — a 2U device at U10 takes U10 and U11. Positions step in half units. An asset with no device type is treated as 1U and full depth.
  • A device must fit the rack: from the starting unit up to the top unit.
  • A device is mounted on one face. A full-depth device (the device type says so) takes both faces; two half-depth devices can share a unit, one on each face.
  • A placement over units another device holds is refused, and the message names the device in the way with a link to it. So is a placement over reserved units.
  • A device in a parent device's device bay takes no rack units of its own, and a 0U device (a PDU strip mounted on the side) takes no position.
  • A racked asset's site and location are its rack's: change them by moving the asset to another rack, or remove it from the rack first.
  • Changing a racked asset's device type is refused when the new height no longer fits or overlaps a neighbour.

Two people placing devices into the same units at the same moment cannot both succeed: one placement is saved and the other is refused.

Utilisation

A rack's utilisation is the units its devices occupy (either face, half units counting as half) out of its height, minus the units held only by devices whose device type is excluded from utilisation (blanking panels, cable managers). An empty rack is 0 %.

Find racked assets

Query Finds
rack = R12 assets in rack R12 (by name or facility ID)
rack.site:ams-1 assets in a rack of site AMS-1 (name or slug)
rack.role = network assets in racks with the Network role
position >= 40 assets whose lowest unit is U40 or higher
face = rear assets mounted on a rear face
exists(rack) every racked asset

The asset list's CSV export carries Site, Location, Rack, U and Face columns.

API

/api/v2/inventory-service/dcim/rack-roles, /dcim/rack-types, /dcim/racks and /dcim/rack-reservations (list, create, read, edit, delete); GET /dcim/racks/{id}/elevation returns the rack's per-unit occupancy of both faces, its reservations and its utilisation; GET, PUT and DELETE /dcim/assets/{id}/placement read, set and clear an asset's placement. A refused placement answers 409 with placement_conflict and the blocking asset or reservation. Reads need dcim.read, writes dcim.manage.