We continue to develop DCImanager's IPAM capabilities. We have added a hierarchical display of networks in the new version. This allows you to see the structure of the entire address space: parent and child networks, their relationships and dependencies, and the percentage of occupied addresses.
Now all established networks are displayed not only linearly, but also taking into account their nesting. This makes it easier to find networks in use and understand adjacent networks, speeds up merging or splitting networks, and helps reserving subnets quickly. In addition, the accuracy of address space planning is improved, which is especially useful for working with large and distributed systems.
This new feature will be useful for customers with large networks distributed across multiple sites: owned and leased, managed by different departments, or shared with other customers.
Why network hierarchy is needed
As the infrastructure grows, the network ceases to be linear – tens and hundreds of subnets for various tasks and commands require routing and connectivity with higher-level networks. Without a clear hierarchy, even the simple task of finding a block of consecutive addresses becomes a complex process.
Hierarchical display allows you to see the relationships between networks, centrally monitor them across multiple sites, prevent address conflicts, plan work intelligently, and quickly find IP addresses in the required ranges.
Examples of practical cases
– In enterprise scenarios, various commands may be responsible for different subnets. When launching a new business service, it is necessary to ensure connectivity between a “zoo of subnets” across multiple sites and simultaneously find a whole block of available IP addresses so that subnets from various data centers can interact correctly.
– In hosting, several different departments can work on multiple sites with dozens of networks from multiple providers and with their own. In this case, some ranges are leased to clients in their entirety, while others are split into individual addresses for individual distribution or distributed across multiple locations. The hierarchical display helps you gather the whole picture in one window: see the structure and nesting as well as control the purpose of networks and store additional information about them.
As we can see from the examples, the new feature makes working with the address space more predictable and structured for live operation or for scaling. Find out more about this new feature in the documentation.
In upcoming VMmanager releases, we will also add hierarchical network display to the virtualization management platform. By using DCImanager and VMmanager together through a common IPmanager, it will be possible to create a unified and transparent hierarchy for all networks used.
