Having well labeled cabling can be a life saver for a System Admin. There's few things more frustrating than having mystery cabling and when you have a problem you don't know which port on the switch a particular piece of equipment is plugged into.
At the last large company I worked for they has a wonderful cable labeling scheme where each cable would be labelled with the path it took including server, rack or cabinet, row, and port it was coming from and going to.
I just purchased a Brother P-touch PT-2030 for labeling. I will use TZeFX Flexible Laminated tape which they recommend for small curved surfaces like cables.
Most groups color code their cables as well - something like this:
- User patch cables - BLUE
- Cables to backup switch - GREEN
- Cables to ILO or DRAC - WHITE
- Crossover Cables - RED
For a small network closet or server room a rack configuration like this makes sense, with short patch cabled (2 ft.) so its really easy to see where the cables go and to move them around if needed. That was you can get away with only labelling cables for server and equipment, not user patch cables going to wall ports. As long as the patch panel is labelled for each wall port it goes to the short cables maked it easy to trace.
Core Switch
24pt patch panel
48pt access switch
24pt patch panel
24pt patch panel
48pt access switch
24pt patch panel