How do we set category on VMware custom attributes

[ashleyw]

Hi,

We started to categorise our 500 VMs and soon lost interest when we saw how clunky/slow the the web interface appears to be.
What we'd like to do is to be able to use the vCentre VM view and modify the values of the veeam custom attributes there to match the Veeam groups - as it's much quicker doing this as we can modify in tabular form.
I went through the 500 VMs in about 10 minutes putting the correct tags in the Veeam custom attribute column.

I then went to business view thinking it would look at those values to populate it's own database - it doesn't.

When we try to manually categorise some of the VMs, some of them seem to categorise fine, others seem to ignore the category change - all incredibly frustrating.

How do we do all our categorisations from the custom attributes tabular view in VCentre and then populate the business view categorisations from this?

Even after manual categorisation, we have problems with the Veeam business view plugin to Veeam Monitor picking up the changes - I assume this is some sort of caching issue?

Is Veeam business view ready for prime time or just an on-the-side add on to Veeam B&R?
Is anyone actually using this thing for farm management?
Is the product likely to be updated as the version seems to have been static now for some time?

thanks.

[ashleyw]

looks like I jumped the gun a bit - we are on version 1 of the product - shows how often we use it

I'm busy downloading and installing version 2 then we'll report back.

Looking at some of these other postings on the forum, it looks like we are stuck with categorisation via web interface of business view and not through vCentre - at the very least there should be a database script that could be run which would verify the values in each custom attribute on each VM to make sure they match to a business view category value and then to populate the business view data form this.

Are there are powershell APIs to business view so that I could perform this without have to understand the database structure?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Ashley,

Yeah, it's better to start the evaluation with version 2 , though our UI hasn't changed a lot, it is still a web based application, but we've added dynamic categorization support that you should find pretty useful.

As to the PowerShell API question, then it is not available, however you DO have an ability to map existing custom attributes from vCenter Server to your BV categories. Please have a look at our User Guide (page 22) for more info.

Hope this helps!

[ashleyw]

hi, thanks a lot for that. After installing version 2 and importing using the additional attribute I had created, everything worked as it should.

However, when I go to the workspace view, and see the data in an HTML grid format and then click on the export to Excel button, I just get a web page with a table in it rather than Excel opening up like it should.

Is there a security setting or something I need to change to allow Excel to open up (from either Firefox or IE)?

cheers

[Vitaliy.Mzokov]

However, when I go to the workspace view, and see the data in an HTML grid format and then click on the export to Excel button, I just get a web page with a table in it rather than Excel opening up like it should.

Is there a security setting or something I need to change to allow Excel to open up (from either Firefox or IE)?

Ashley, usually it should work fine. Try adding Veeam Business View web site into "Trusted sites" list in IE's options. If this does not help then please contact our support team and ask for help.

- VM.

[ashleyw]

great stuff. thanks it works fine under IE now once the site is added to the trusted sites group as you described. I have a couple of unrelated questions now. I'll post a new forum entry to avoid confusion.