Network floorplanning software.

[youri377]

Hi everyone,

 

I work for a music venue as head technician, i'm mainly responsible for maintaning the audio, lighting & video tech and that's where most of my knowledge is. Additionally i'm responsible for our entire IT. We are currently expanding with a second larger hall, our capacity's are going to be 350 (current hall) and about 700 for the new large one. Due to Covid we are shut down but able to survive, budgets have been cut dramaticaly tho which means we are doing as much of the planning and furnishing ourselves.

 

Now the current network with a few switches & AP's is fairly simple and was setup by a local company a few years ago, for the expansion i'm forced to do this on my own tho. Now I'm confident i can get everything up and running but have little experience planning a system like this and i'm having trouble finding a good piece of software to create floorplans showing all the equipment & create a patch list of all connections.

 

what i would ideally like is something that alows me to visually map all switches, AP's, CCTV cams, PC's, spare wall jacks & anything else that needs a connection onto a floorplan, assign a logical numbering code to these items based on room number etc, assign them to patch panels and switch ports in my main Rack, and the software then automatically creates a patch list (spreadsheet) for me. going the other way round could work aswell, i create the patch list and then drag everything too it's location on a floorplan. everything should then be linked, so if i change something on the floorplan the patch get's updated and vice versa.

 

a way to keep track of Vlan's, print labels for all the ports and patch panels or other helpfull info would be great but not strictly necessary.

 

does something like this exist? I'm finding a ton of diagramming software like MS visio or lucidchart but those don't seem to have anykind of patch list feature, also uploading an existing floorplan as "background" doens't seem to be an option here. 

 

how do the pro's go about this? I can't be the only one wanting to do things this way? it seems logical to have your plans match the real world as close as possible, not just having theoretical diagrams?

[Electronics Wizardy]

I have worked with and done this in my previous office, and found these documents done in CAD software and visio. THere isn't a asy way to map it so you make it all from scratch ontop of your existing floorplan.

[Dutch_Master]

KiCAD is an Open source tool, mostly used for electronics and PCB design but it does have a section for hydraulics as well. So it should be possible to implement your use case too. I don't think it allows importing a floorplan though, so it might be of limited value for your case.

 

As for the topology: mirror the existing setup and expand where needed to allow for the bigger hall. Then create a backbone between the central point of the new setup with your rack, using link-aggregation (combining 2 or more physical network cables into a single connection) for higher bandwidth. If you can budget-wise, use fibre-optic cables to be prepared for future expansion. An investment now will save considerable costs later.