We are just shifting across to a new rack and until now have used names of cartoon characters. This is not going to work anymore, and need a better naming convention.

Physically i would like to name the servers by location, and then have an alias as to its actual function/customer, i.e.

Physical name

LONS1R1SVR1 meaning London, suite 1, rack 1, server 1

Customer Alias

Since the servers can be reassigned from time to time, for the above physical server name, i would have an alias as a column in a spreadsheet, that would be set to the customers host-name, i.e.

wwww.customerserver1.com

Patching

For patching, I am looking at labeling up the physically connections, i.e.

• LON1S1R1SVR1-PWR1
• LON1S1R1SVR1-PWR2
• LON1S1R1SVR1-ETH0
• LON1S1R1SVR1-KVM

Ultimately if i am labeling cables, I really want to avoid putting LON1S1R1SQLSVR on any patch cord in case the server gets formatted and changed from a SQL server to a WWW server which would need to relabel all the patch cords also.

In addition, throwing in virtual machines, i have got confused very quickly.

I appreciated that it may be confusing having a physical host-name and customer alias.

Please let me know what you run with and any other standards or best practices that i can follow?