[dsr_]

This puts the focus in the wrong place.

When wiring a rack, you've got to start with an understanding of what you want each piece to do. If you have a switch where all the ports are untagged or on a common VLAN, the only thing which matters about cable placement in the switch is how easy it is to trace later on. If you have multiple VLANs, you need to have a map right there in front of you saying how the ports are assigned.

On the physical level, dealing with intermittent connectivity issues (cable not plugged in properly, cable damaged by mechanical stress) and difficulty extracting cables (RJ45 lock lever too small or stuck) are relatively common issues that won't be adequately simulated in VR anytime soon.

[tjoff]

Three quotes from UGTools in the reddit thread (in no meaningful order), they are each in the own separate context but I feel they are somewhat informative on their own as well as where the focus is.

Oh for sure. What I mean is real life entangled cables can easily be recreated everywhere while data centers, expensive equipment and interaction with complex topologies cannot, hence the convenience of using VR scenarios for this. Also VR today would not be a very good tool to train for entangled cables due to lack of proper haptics, the use of controllers instead of your own hands and unstable physics.

You have different tasks but usually it is racking & stacking, cabling according to some specifications and also troubleshooting connectivity issues. Since you have access to all device consoles there is a wide range of possible exercises.

There's actually a lot of stuff happening in the background. All these devices are running in a virtual machine and the cabling updates those devices in real time. You can start Telnet sessions to all devices (the TV screen shows briefly an active Telnet session if you look closely) and even send commands using a keyboard.

[CommieBobDole]

My thought is this is probably an attempt to bring a physical paradigm to a software-defined network, since it's apparently a Cisco project.

Though your comment brings to mind a couple of things that might be useful in the world of physical networking:

1. An AR tool that identifies the physical switches and overlays the port VLAN assignments, trunks, etc. Bonus points if it could color-code the cables accordingly, though I don't know how you'd track them through a knot somewhere.

2. A physical switch with RGB port LEDs with color-coded port assignments would also be nice. Very nice.

[dsr_]

2 would be pretty easy to do the second one in software right now: "Switch, steady orange on all untagged ports, blinky orange on all VLAN 601."

Port LED status lights are already multipurpose: https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/release-independ...

It would be nice to get the ability to control them more generally.

[mmmBacon]

I spend time designing networking equipment for one of the FAANG companies and we spend a lot of time on fiber cabling and general cabling. A limiting factor in deployment and therefore scalability is often the time it takes to wire everything. The goal is to have the install go as quickly as possible while minimizing errors and allowing serviceability. Given the density of our racks, you often aren’t able to foresee all problems with the cabling until we’ve built many mockups and done the first installs. This would be a useful tool and allow people to play with more scenarios more rapidly. To your point, we have defined the network role of the equipment and all the striping way in advance of receiving any hardware.