Updated cable end shapes for SAS 6Gbps and ACP cable shapes
First iteration of transitional SAS cable Visio shapes looked odd to me, one end of the cable contained “12G” speed indication, while the other one was just empty shape without additional information, so I’ve changed the older cable end shapes to contain speed indication as well “6G”. This led to need for updated cable ends for older SAS 6Gbps cables as well.
SAS 6Gbps cables are used in ready-made stacks for older DS2xx6 shelves, which also contain ACP cabling, so I decided also to upgrade ACP cables to be more descriptive. Now ACP cable end contains letters “ACP” to distinguish that from 1GbE cable.
Screenshot: New SAS6 and ACP cable shapes / placeholders in Visio Shape Window
Cleaning up SAS cables
After adding transitional SAS cables to Cables stencil, there were simply too many SAS cables. To reduce clutter I’ve dropped separate left and right hand variants from the stencil for SAS cables.
The thumbnails for SAS cables in Visio shapes window are fairly small and it might be hard to tell difference between Node1 (N1) and Node2 (N2) cables without reading the shape name. To help visual recognition all Node1 SAS cables are now left-handed while all Node2 SAS cables are right-handed. This way they don’t get mixed up so easily. If you need different handed versions for either, it easy enough just pull the cable handles to get required routing. Also new placeholder shapes makes the stencil easier to navigate
Screenshot: 6Gbps / 12 Gbps SAS cable shape and placeholder thumbnails in Visio Shape Window
Updated NetApp disk shelf and SAS stack shapes
DS2246 / DS4246 / DS4486 SAS Stacks
Since I updated SAS6 and ACP cabling it made sense to update other shapes that were using these cables, so I’ve updated older SAS shelf stack shapes for DS2246 / DS4246 / DS4486. While at it I also made the stack shapes “smarter” like DS212C and DS224C stack shapes, each shelf in a stack derives label describing disk config from the first shelf of the stack (unless overridden with “Unique shelf config?” setting).
DS212C / DS224C SAS Stacks with Quad-Path cabling
I also experimented with Quad-Path HA cabling for DS212C / DS224C shapes, but unfortunately using Visio layers functionality didn’t work as I expected. It works okay with Visio, but not with PDF-exported drawings. Layers and layer visibility are NOT carried over to PDF-format, and quad-path cabling was visible all the time, even when quad-path cabling was toggled to be hidden in Visio format.
In case somebody wants to use Quad-Path cabling, I saved my experiment in a separate Stacks-DS2xxC-Quad-Path-Stencil. I will not actively update this stencil, there is a better way to do it, but right now I don’t have time to fix this.
Screenshot: DS212C / DS224C SAS Stacks shapes with Quad-Path cabling in Visio Shape Window (minor error: shape names are the same as shape names with dual path cabling)
DS212C / DS224C SAS Stacks with Dual-Path cabling
“Normal” Stacks-DS2xxC-Stencil contains now only dual-path cabling and no visio layers are used.
There are other ways to combine dual-path and quad-path cabling in one stencil. One way is to toggle “transparency” setting for each cable individually, which in turn might require a bit of VBA coding. I’ve already burned quite many hours while updating my stencils and I need a break, so I will test this approach next time I need to make a major overhaul on SAS stack shapes.
DontPokeThePolarBear 