Ideas about supporting fractional rack units and how we might solve it

[jathanism]

There have been some inquiries about whether Nautobot can support fractional rack units. It can't today. But what if?

Valid use cases

• Blade chassis
• Devices that are the same unit height but don't fill width or depth of the rack elevation/shelf

Current potential ways to implement it

• Using a parent device and attaching child devices using device bays (a hack if this doesn't model the real world)
• Or model a “shelf” device and track the actual devices as un-racked, but still assigned to the rack (another hack)

Challenges

• Drawing rack elevation diagrams with fractional height/widths
• Calculating available space for fractional units

[ancker010]

I think it might be helpful to specify the concern is rack width, not rack unit.
A 1U shelf with two mac minis, netbeez, or something else is still 1U, but each device would be 1/2 width, etc.

[jathanism]

That sounds like your ask, so thanks for clarifying, but there's also some internal discussion about fractional heights, like 1.5U, which also is not currently possible.

[ancker010]

1.5U is blasphemy. :)