Building a Patch Location Favorite

Patch Locations are the physical hubs where fiber components come together. A Patch Location can include a single wall-mounted Patch Panel servicing a 12–count fiber, or it could include dozens of racks, each with several Patch Panels with hundreds of fiber strands. Given the flexible relationship structure of fiber features,Fiber Manager is ready to accommodate various arrangements of fiber components.

Whether simple or complicated, most Patch Locations share the same hierarchy of relationships. From top to bottom, a Patch Location comprises:

The Patch Location itself, which is the physical location of the fiber components
- Racks, which are simply metal structures upon which Patch Panels or other devices are mounted
  - Patch Panels, which are mounted hardware encasements that comprise a number of Cards
    - Cards, which house the fiber ports in a variety of arrangements and counts
      - Ports, which have both a front and back side

The above is a common hierarchy of relationships, but please remember that your company’s schema might vary from the above. Regardless of your exact schema, you can still use the following topics as a guide to build Favorites, as these topics start from the beginning without any previously-attributed object tables.

Keep the following considerations in mind while building a favorite:

When building a Patch Location favorite, you encounter many choices along the way. For example,
- How many Panel positions are available on the Rack?
- How many Cards are on the Panel?
- What is the arrangement of ports? For example, if a Card has 24 ports, are they arranged in a 12 x 2 pattern? 4 x 6?
You want to have answers ready for these kinds of questions. In fact, having a picture of the Rack and its components is particularly helpful while building the favorite.
The best favorites are those that can be used repeatedly, so it is recommended to build your most common configurations first.
Building favorites occurs inside an ArcMap editing session. Save often!

TIP: As a final tip, it is helpful to build the largest Patch Location (meaning, the one with the most racks, panels, and devices you expect to encounter) first. It is easier to remove unnecessary objects than to add new ones. In other words, pruning down a “master Patch Location” with the kitchen sink of devices is easier than building new tables on a simple Patch Location.

The following topics build a Patch Location that includes:

1 Rack
- Each Rack comprises 3 Panels
  - Each Panel comprises 4 Cards
    - Each Card comprises 24 Ports

Stepping back, this means the Rack has 3 Patch Panels, and each Patch Panel has 96 Ports. Typically, the back side of the port is connected to the fiber, and the front side is ready to service a communication device, an electrical system, or act as a jumper to another port. While your common configurations might not match this exact setup, this setup is used so that we may explore all the configuration choices along the way.