HughBorg707

Originally posted at: http://www.1zero1.net/2009/10/08/generate-visio-map-your-vmware-network-automatically

Mapping your network manually using Visio can be a time consuming affair on all but the smallest of networks. After going in-depth into many different articles already on the web, I decided to pull together the pieces I found and drop it into a list to make it easier for you to find and install also.

Step 1: Download and install the Microsoft Windows Powershell 1.0 .

Step 2: Download and install the VMWare PowerCLI. If you receive a warning related to Powershell execution policy, open PowerCLI and type the following command:

Set-ExecutionPolicy remotesigned

Step 3: Download and install PowerGUI. Make sure that you select the VMWare VI Client Integration feature option.

Also download the VMWare.VIToolkit.powerpack file to your desktop.

Step 4: Run PowerGUI and in the top left hand corner you will see a button called PowerPack Management. Click on it and you will see the Import button. Click on that and select the VMware.VITookit.powerpack you downloaded earlier.

Step 5: Download the VESI_Visio.zipfile and unzip it into your My Documents\MyShapes folder. This assumes you already have Visio installed on this system.

Step 6: ***Important*** You will have to manually rename the Visio Stencil to make it work with PowerGUI per this article. (Resolved by renaming vesi_visio.vsd to Virtualization Visio Stencil.vss)

Step 7: Once you have completed all the above steps, run PowerGUI and connect it to your VM network by adding either your VirtualCenter server or individual ESX Hosts. Once you have at least one host discovered you can click on it on in the left window and then look to the right window under Actions and find Generate vDiagram. This opens the Parameters box where you can choose what you want to map:

HostToVM, NetworkToVM, DatastoreToVM, HostToDatastore, and MaximumLeafDepth

Click OK. It may take a few seconds but Visio will automatically start and you will see the VMs appear one-by-one as they are discovered, Each type of option will display in its own map page.

I hope you find this how-to informative!

So I thought the project was easy enough. I simply wanted to add a 1TB eSATA drive to an ESX 3.5 box so that Backup Exec 12.5 would have a place to dump daily and weekly backup rotations until they could be saved to tape at the end of the month and taken offsite. It was a small project or so I thought.

Once I figured out that my SIL3512a eSATA card was not going to work correctly, I picked up a SiiG 4 port SATA RAID card. I flashed it to non-RAID mode and installed it. Everything recognized, all good to go.

Creating a virtual disk under VMWare was no problem, and then getting the to recognize in 2003 Server was not a problem.

The problem came whenever I tried to actually use the disks for backup. The throughput was good, everything seemed okay, but after usually 2 or 3 backups, the whole VM would freeze, I couldn't power it off, and eventually ended up having to reboot the entire box. What's more, once I tried to restart the VM, it would fail with an error that I have posted here before.

I went through the process 2 more times, each time having to delete the VMDK virtual disk and start over setting up backup-to-disk folders. Each time it would start to work, and then same error. (http://communities.vmware.com/thread/210450)

I finally seemed to have narrowed it down to 1 unknown oversight on my part. When I went to format the disks in 2003 Server as NTFS, I used "quick format". I've done this in the past with no known problems. Apparently VMWare does not like that. Once I manually formatted the disk NTFS and let it take its time and do it, I haven't had the same problems.

Time will tell but I'm interested to know why this would make a difference.

Anyone?