Need to document your environment? Check out “As Built Report”

Documentation – ew, yuck.  I know, I know.  However, if you work in an environment with tight change control and validation requirements then this will strike your fancy.

For the longest time I’ve combined bits and pieces of various scripts and utilities such as RVTools, Alan Renouf’s vCheck Report, some aspects of vDocumentation (thanks to Ariel Sanchez’s Philly VMUG session on the topic), along with some homebrew PowerCLI crap that isn’t worth sharing.  This has always provided 98% of the information I’d need to properly document a vSphere cluster/build, but that last 2% was screen grabs and putting the various HTML/CSV files together into something cohesive.

No more, my friends!

While watching some VMworld 2018 sessions this one caught my eye: VIN3327BU – Documenting Your Virtual Infrastructure with PowerShell and PowerCLI by Tim Carman.

I won’t bore you with blurred out screenshots of the output.  Instead, I will encourage you to just run this puppy.  It’s epic.  You can survey your vSphere, Nutanix, UCS, NSX, and FlashArray infrastructure and output as HTML, DOC, XML, and TXT while also emailing the results.  Further, you can save the configuration as a JSON file to be run again in the future if you need to provide the same report every month, for instance.

Everything can be installed from PowerShell gallery – the only requirement outside of PowerCLI is PScribo for formatting the output.  One thing I can’t really convey without uploading a whole report is how organized and professional the output is.  Can literally run this script and send it to a client without tweaking.

Thanks a ton to Tim Carman and Matt Allford for putting this together – I am now ready to overwhelm even the most scrutinizing of compliance officers!

Author: Jon

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