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Docs/Guide/Rack Layout & Panels

Rack Layout & Panels

Rack elevations with patch panels and fiber LIUs — drawn, saved, exported, and priced into the BOM.

Relevant for:Pre-Sales / DesignProfessional ServicesEnterprise / NetOps
Where to find itCanvas toolbar→More→Rack Layout

Rack Layout turns the devices on the canvas into rack elevations — the drawing the person standing in the room actually installs from. Every device is sized in rack units from its model (a Nexus 9508 takes its real 13U, a fixed switch its 1U), redundant pairs are split across racks so one rack failure cannot drop both, and each device carries a criticality dot (click to cycle critical → important → standard).

Exported rack elevation: two racks, each with a 48-port switch and its patch panel directly above it
The exported elevation. Dashed blocks are passive panels — each patch panel sits directly above the switch it serves.

Patch panels & fiber LIUs — drawn for you#

The elevation includes the passive hardware a real rack needs, derived from the design itself:

  • Copper — a switch with RJ45 access ports gets a matching Cat6A patch panel seated directly above it for the user desk cabling: 48 copper ports → a 48-port panel, 24 → a 24-port panel, one more panel per additional 48 (a fully loaded modular campus chassis gets the full stack it needs). Fiber-faceplate switches — DC leaves, cores, aggregation — correctly get nothing: server and fabric runs are not desk drops.
  • Fiber — a rack containing a device with a fiber link to an ISP(an Internet/MPLS/VPN cloud or an ISP router) gets one 24-port LC fiber panel — the LIU where the carrier's strands terminate. One per rack, however many ISP-facing devices share it. A copper broadband handoff gets no LIU — the panel appears only when the uplink is actually fiber.
  • Inter-switch and inter-router links are cabled directly — no panel is inserted between devices.
Why
An elevation without the passive hardware understates every rack by a U per access switch, and a BOM without panels under-quotes the job by exactly the parts nobody remembers until install day. Deriving them from the design means the drawing, the parts list, and the cabling plan can't drift apart.

Panels are derived, not drawn by hand: drag a switch to another rack and its panel follows; move the last ISP-facing device out of a rack and the LIU goes with it. They appear in the drawer, in the PNG/PDF export, and as a PANELS section in the Bill of Materials — but never as canvas nodes.

The layout is saved#

Apply to devices commits the layout: each device keeps its rack and U position (visible on the General tab as Rack and Location), and reopening the drawer shows exactly the layout you saved — including your drag adjustments — instead of recomputing one. Devices added since are placed into free space automatically and noted. Rack names you type by hand (RACK-A01) survive: they become the rack's identity rather than being renamed on the next Apply. Changing the rack height or count asks for a fresh layout; Apply saves it. And Apply is undoable — ⌘Z restores the previous layout and placements together.

Deterministic first, AI when you want it#

The drawer always renders instantly from a deterministic packer — offline, reproducible, no account needed. On paid plans, Regenerate with AI asks a model to arrange the racks like a facilities engineer: top-of-rack leaves above their servers, spines spread across racks, heavy chassis low, and space reserved above each switch for its panel.

Multi-site designs#

Racks are physical rooms, so the drawer racks one site at a time— pick the site in the toolbar. Each site keeps its own racks; racking one site never touches another's, and the BOM counts panels per site so two buildings' LIUs never collapse into one line.

Export#

PNG and PDF render the elevation from the model itself — crisp at any size, vector in the PDF, with panels drawn dashed so passive hardware reads at a glance. The export is print-palette, independent of your on-screen theme.

Tip
The header counts devices and panels separately (“8 devices · 4 panels · 2 racks”) — if a switch you expected a panel for shows none, check its port inventory: the rule follows the RJ45 data ports, so a switch modeled with an all-fiber faceplate gets no copper panel.