Last updated: January 10, 2020
With Docusnap, you can inventory virtualisation infrastructures managed by Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX, and Citrix XenServer. The documentation of these virtualisation solutions can prove to be extremely valuable. Since these solutions are so important in today’s IT environments, their documentation is a must! As you already know, it is not necessary to install an agent on the management server for using Docusnap inventory. The only thing you need is a user account with appropriate rights to retrieve the corresponding configuration. For detailed instructions, please refer to the Docusnap User Manual. To perform the inventory, simply connect to the desired management server, log on and get started. A dedicated wizard will guide you through the inventory steps.
Virtualisation has profoundly reshaped many IT landscapes
Since virtualisation solutions are at the core of many enterprise IT infrastructures, it is even more important to keep their documentation up-to-date. Configuration changes to the virtual machines are made quite frequently, so the automated creation of the corresponding documentation in the background is a very valuable feature. Of course, the configuration of your environment is an integral part of your usual data backup, but if you want to know whether a recent configuration change has been made to your virtualisation solution – where do you get the required information from? It is certainly no option to restore backed-up data to a test system – only to check the configuration there. This would require too much time and effort or often is hardly feasible at all. Of course, this does not do away with your obligation to perform this process from time to time to be sure that the restore procedure works correctly and thus availability can be ensured.
To document the changes, benefit from the Docusnap inventory again. You can retrieve licenses and roles of a VMware infrastructure, and from the configured data centre, permissions, virtual machines, as well as templates and switches can be retrieved. In addition, it is possible to access the basic configuration of your virtualisation environment in order to document the existing hosts and configuration. The information that Docusnap is able to document includes – among many others – data stores, network adapters, services, and sensors.
By comparing inventory snapshots, you spot changes more quickly
Like other inventories, snapshots of virtual environments can be compared to each other. Within minutes, Docusnap thus provides information on changes made to these vital systems so that you can stay on top of things. In this context, a well-kept IT documentation contributes greatly to ensuring the availability of your IT infrastructure.