Unofficial DPTPB Dynamic Nutanix Visio Shapes | Nutanix Community
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Hello All,

Sami here, the 3rd party developer responsible for the current official Nutanix Visio stencils.

I’ve been playing with few ideas how to make them better and came up with Dynamic Nutanix Visio stencils. 

 

Why DPTPB Dynamic Nutanix Visio shapes?

 

Let's be frank: Documenting can be boring, all the exciting and fun stuff has been done and now you have to document what you've done or plan to do. The harder the tools used for documenting are to use, the less likely you are to produce quality documentation.

My aim with the Nutanix Dynamic Visio shapes is to have ability to produce more detailed and accurate drawings of Nutanix environments in less time. This is accomplished by using intent based workflow and to have built-in automation to populate the drawing with desired elements based on your intent.

 

What are DPTPB Dynamic Nutanix Front and Rear View Shapes?

 

DTPPB Nutanix Dynamic Front & Rear View Shapes are Nutanix NX appliance product images / shapes in Microsoft Visio format. They are used to make drawings with Microsoft Visio to document and design Nutanix environments. The dynamic shapes are designed to be more user friendly and faster to use than the official (non-dynamic) Nutanix Visio shapes, while at the same time providing capability to make more detailed drawings.

A true win-win-win value proposition, easier-faster-better…

 

How to use DPTPB Dynamic Nutanix Front and Rear View Shapes?

 

With non-dynamic Visio shapes you make more detailed drawings by adding manually various elements to existing NX appliance shape. This can be time-consuming and more error prone.

With dynamic shapes you can change the appearance of a NX shape by using pull-down menus containing valid configurations. Once you have made your selections, the built-in automation of the shape will take care of the rest and hide and reveal various elements, such as NICs, NIC port labels, Disks and disk labels. With Dynamic shapes you can also document partially populated Multi-Node blocks.

Much easier, faster and less error prone.

 

Few Examples:

 

Front View NX-3460-G6 shape with 2xNVMe + 4xSSD / Node

 

  • Disks are labeled with color coded labels

  • Disk type and size is shown as text

Rear View NX-3460-G7 shape with 2x40GbE NICs

 

  • NICs are placed in correct PCI slots and in correct orientation

 

 

  • If you want to, you can also label the NIC ports indicating the port speed and possibly cable manufacturer (with DAC cables)

How to get DPTPB Dynamic Nutanix Shapes?

 

Please visit my blog: 

https://dontpokethepolarbear.wordpress.com/2020/02/03/unofficial-dptpb-nutanix-dynamic-visio-shapes-intro/

Download link can be found at the end of above post

At this point Dynamic Nutanix Visio stencils are unofficial. So, if you have any feedback regarding the DPTPB Dynamic Nutanix Visio Stencil, please leave your comments here or in my blog. Contacting Nutanix won’t help :)

 

Hope you like them,

Sami