FloorPlan

Data Center Floor Plans
The easiest and most intuitive way to navigate the system is to utilize a floor plan of your data center. openDCIM will not generate a floor plan for you, but can easily import floor plans that you have made already.

Supported Formats
The overlay libraries should work just fine with:
 * PNG
 * JPG
 * GIF
 * BMP

It is highly discouraged to use BMP, though, since the file sizes are so large.

File Location
You will need to upload your floorplan file to the drawings/ folder of the web server, relative to the position of the document root. For example, if you placed openDCIM in /var/www/html/opendcim/, then your floor plans would go into /var/www/html/opendcim/drawings/.

Selecting your Floorplan
The floor plan is selected in the data center editing page. Simply enter the file name of the floor plan that you uploaded to the drawings/ directory of the web server.



Best Practices
You do not want to use a lot of dark colors in your floor plan, because openDCIM will overlay other colors on top of it. It does this with a semi-transparent block, so the blending of colors can certainly make things look a bit off. Typically I leave the floor tiles as black and white, the cabinets as a light grey, and only add color to infrastructure items that won't be mapped, such as air handlers, power panels, perforated tiles, and UPS's.

CAD Drawings of your data center can often times be too busy to work effectively. All of the floor plans used by the developers are made with Visio and simply exported to a PNG file format. The sample floor plan that you see on the demo installation was made in Visio.

Drawings scaled to 800 pixels wide seem to work the best in terms of readability, but your web browser will automatically scale other sizes as well.

Floor Plan Uses
As stated, the floor plan is used to navigate to specific cabinets. This is done by mapping out the coordinates of each cabinet. When you are viewing a cabinet (selected via the Sidebar tree, since you don't have the coordinates mapped out, yet!), there is a button on the right hand side to Map Coordinates. If you click that button, you will get a mapping selector, as shown in the diagram to the left. Simply draw a rectangle around the region that you want to make clickable for the currently selected cabinet.

In addition to using the coordinates for creating clickable regions, the map will display the color coordinated metrics (red/yellow/green by default) at each defined region that represent capacity. There are buttons at the top right of the map that let you select viewing a single capacity metric, or a composite of all of them.

Next Topic - Managing Cabinets (the container)

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