Hi all,
I mentioned, when talking with a customer, about how I had to update my Visio of my home lab with the changes I had done recently. There were groans and I asked why. The amount of work to update Visio diagrams. I said there was very little work as I had a tool that did the work. I said that Veeam ONE can do a Visio of your VMware infrastructure and they laughed. So here we go.
You will need a Windows machine with Visio installed.
- First you should access the Veeam ONE Reporter - which is normally https://FQDN:1239. After authentication you will see a collection of reports.
- The report that has an output that we can use with Visio is in the Offline Reports folder - seen near the end of the list.
- When you look into the Offline Reports folder you see what we are after!
- So click on the Infrastructure Overview (Visio) report name.
- We need to confirm the scope of operations. So click on the blue Virtual Infrastructure link.
- I can see my infrastructure is all selected so that is good. Now we can use OK to return.
- Now if you want VMs included in your diagram, and I do, you can select the VM checkbox.
- Once your Include VMs is checked, or not checked, you can hit the Preview button.
- Once you hit that button, you will see a brief collecting data dialog, or if you have a very big lab it will take a little longer. One it is done you will have a file downloaded.
- No matter how hard you try and load this file into Visio it will not work. You must download the Veeam Report Viewer. Which, BTW, is not a viewer. It is a translate tool. You need to download it and install it where Visio is. Also move the infrastructure.vmr where the Viewer and Visio is.
- The viewer installs very fast and leaves an icon on your desktop.
- Start up the tool, and you should see something like below.
- You can see I used it once already successfully. Lets use the File \ Open option to load the infrastructure.vmr file.
- It takes a few minutes, but we are waiting for it to say done. Depending on the size and complexity of your environment it could take a few minutes.
- Once it is done it will pop up Visio. But put it away for now.
- We want to see the viewer to make sure it was a success. After all, this is not about one diagram but a multiple of them!
- Now you change to the following folder on the machine where the Viewer and Visio were. Each day you run the Viewer it will put another folder into the My Veeam Reports folder. As you can see below it is the Valentine’s day folder we are in.
- The Index is an overview, and the config one shows what is powered up or not but the others are what you think. And they print nice.
So now you have Visios of your lab or infrastructure, it may have took you a few minutes to get it all done the first time, but the second or third is much faster.
BTW, I did this with Update 4 of Veeam ONE, and 6.7 U1 of vSphere.
Michael
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