cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
854
Views
0
Helpful
5
Replies

Network diagram help

urrgct
Level 1
Level 1

I have been given the task of creating a network diagram for my newly located company. As a novice of networks, it would be great if you could iron out some of my problems...

Could anyone point me in the direction of online methodologies for designing such a diagram, ranging from a high, to a very low level of detail. The site is about 1km long (at it's greatest) with 11 seperate buildings all connected to a central comms room.

Are there any standards to which I should follow??

5 Replies 5

thisisshanky
Level 11
Level 11

NetViz is a very good tool for making network diagrams with ultra detail ranging from geographical level to a very low level detail.

If you have Microsoft Visio Prof, You could use different tabs to indicate each level, starting with a high level geographical overview, then moving on to a general network diagram (without ip addresses and other details), and then move on to individual locations (which gives more details on IP addresses etc).

Sankar Nair
UC Solutions Architect
Pacific Northwest | CDW
CCIE Collaboration #17135 Emeritus

thank you for your response, but the problem is not how to draw the network, more the way in which it is set out...I can't seem to find any examples of diagrams, at any level of detail.

With network diagrams you often find that by determining exactly what you want the structure of the diagram will determine itself. The types of diagrams will generally fall into either the logical or physical categories, and can then be drawn accordingly.

It may be that you would like to know where the network equipment is situated in each building, so a series of diagrams for each building could be drawn showing where each item is located within a comms rack. Alternatively, you may be more interested in the physical connections, in which case you could start with a high level diagram of the 11 buildings, with just the one or two routers in each that handle the inter-building connections shown. You could then have further diagrams for each building to show the internal connections to other routers / switches / critical servers etc. with the diagram constructed to clearly show the interconnections rather than the precise location of the equipment.

A logical diagram may be more concerned with the location of VLANs and associated trunks, IP numbering domains etc. This can be high level, showing which VLANs / IP ranges are used within the various switches, trunks or buildings, or low level where you indicate which VLAN is assigned to which port.

One word of advice - unless your network is incredibly stable, don't go down to too much detail on the diagrams as they will either require a large amount of maintenance to record moves and changes, or go out of date quickly. Show what is required to help you in your job, especially in troubleshooting situations, and no more.

Again, many thanks for your response.

Regarding the Logical Diagram: do you have any links to examples for such an architecture.

I'm afraid I haven't got any links I can give you at the moment as all the diagrams I have are internal and relate to customers. If I manage to find anything else I'll post it, but don't hold your breath!!

Getting Started

Find answers to your questions by entering keywords or phrases in the Search bar above. New here? Use these resources to familiarize yourself with the community: