Equipment diagram and Visio woes
Performance Harness Diagram
Part of my documentation is diagram of all of the equipment. Some of this will include physical connections for those items that are static, but there will be a large portion of the equipment that is dynamic and changing based on the use of the Apcon Intellapatch switch we have in the mix.
In diagramming this stuff, I’ve found, to no big surprise, that vendors still don’t keep up with Visio templates. What I was surprised about is how many vendors don’t keep up!
IXIA doesn’t have any of their newer chassis in the templates they make available through a 3rd party. ANUE doesn’t have any templates I can find at all (hence the orange box in my diagram to the left).
Of those that had templates that were semi current, APCON’s came with fully populated chassis instead of the individual shapes so you could add the specific cards you want. I’m sure you could unlock the shape, deconstruct some of it, and then go from there. They do include a number of different cards in the template, just not undocked from the chassis. F5 has some nice updated templates, but they seem more marketing than anything – 3D shadows and all.
Dell was the only vendor to have accurate and well thought out templates with the right shapes, sizes, combos, views (both front and back for everything) along with just about everything else you could think of.
Not that I use Visio constantly, and want pretty shapes, but I would have thought this would be pretty straightforward for vendors to keep updated. Oh well. Back to diagram-land…