VRO Basic Guide (Part 9) - Document Template Analysis

Series Table of Contents:

• VRO Basic Guide (Part 1) - Introduction
• VRO Basic Guide (Part 2) - Installation and Deployment
• VRO Basic Guide (Part 3) - Basic Components (Part 1)
• VRO Basic Guide (Part 4) - Basic Components (Part 2)
• VRO Basic Guide (Part 5) - First Steps to a Successful Disaster Recovery Plan
• VRO Basic Guide (Part 6) - Data Lab
• VRO Basic Guide (Part 7) - Plan Step (Part 1)
• VRO Basic Guide (Part 8) - Plan Step (Part 2)
• VRO Basic Guide (Part 9) - Document Template Analysis
• VRO Basic Guide (Part 10) - Using VRO with K10 for Complete Automated Container Disaster Recovery

In this final part of the series, I’ll introduce VRO’s documentation system.

VRO can automatically generate all the system documentation needed for disaster recovery for administrators. The document content is automatically generated by the VRO system based on Orchestration Plan settings and execution. The power of the VRO documentation system lies in the fact that all content is automatically generated by the system based on configuration and runtime, so administrators only need to focus on their disaster recovery work, leaving all subsequent basic support and tedious document creation to VRO.

Each document generated by VRO contains two parts. The first part is the Report Template defined by the disaster recovery administrator; the second part is the dynamic content generated by the system based on the Report Type. Regardless of the document type, the beginning part of each document will use the content defined in the Report Template, while the second part will automatically fill in relevant content based on different Report Types.

Let’s first look at a practical example to understand what content comes from the Report Template and what is automatically generated based on the Report Type, as shown in the figure below:

The left side shows a Readiness Check Report finally generated by VRO, while the right side shows the Report Template opened in an editor. As you can see, the content highlighted in the red box comes from the Report Template, while the latter part of the document on the left is content automatically generated based on this Report Type.

Report Type

First, let’s talk about Report Type. If you’re clever, you may have already noticed in the previous introductions to Orchestration Plans that there are some Reports that can be generated in the right-click menu or toolbar of each Plan. They are:

These Reports are all the Report documents that VRO can generate. Each of these documents has pre-designed content built into VRO, which can be combined with the Report Template defined by the disaster recovery administrator to ultimately form a complete, readable Report.

This part of the content already built into VRO cannot be changed by us. The system will automatically generate this content based on the actual report type, current disaster recovery plan settings, and the plan’s operation and execution, so we don’t need to make any changes to the settings here.

Therefore, this part of the content currently only includes an English version, and we have no way to modify the relevant information. Of course, if our Plan contains Chinese information, VRO can still correctly pass it to the Report and generate relevant content.

Report Template

The Report Template content is something that administrators can customize according to their own needs for the first part of each document. In the VRO factory software, default templates in 8 languages are already built-in. It should be noted that these default templates cannot be edited, but they can be directly called by the Report system and used in Orchestration Plans. If you need to edit these templates or create your own templates, you must first Clone a copy of your own from these templates, and then make modifications based on this copy.

Editing these documents requires Word, requiring Word 2010 SP2 or higher versions. This means that you need to have Word 2010 SP2 or higher installed on the computer currently opening the VRO webpage to perform normal editing. After clicking the Edit button in the VRO interface, the system will automatically switch from the web browser to Microsoft Word for editing.

Unlike normal Word editing, this template editing is editing a dynamic document, where you can add many variables from VRO, allowing the VRO system to automatically fill them in when generating Reports.

How to Edit Dynamic Documents with Word

1. First, you need to select a built-in Template as the object you want to edit, and click the Clone button to start creating your own Template. For example, I’ll select Veeam Default Template (ZH) here.

2. In the Clone Template dialog box, select which Scope to assign to your name, then give this Template a distinctive name and fill in a description to complete the template creation.

3. After creation, you can see this template in the Template list, and the toolbar buttons above can also operate on this template. You can click Edit to edit the content. Here, VAO does not provide a built-in document editor. This Edit button will directly call Word on the computer where the current browser is located for editing, requiring that the administrator must have correctly installed Microsoft Word.

4. After clicking Edit, it will switch to the Word program. It should be noted that Word will not open the document immediately, but requires access permission. The permission required here must be the user currently logged into VAO in the browser, otherwise this Word will not be able to open the document template.

5. After opening the document, you can proceed with normal Word editing. This document is not fully editable - you will find that many areas are highlighted in yellow. This highlighted content is the editable area where you can freely add needed text and image content. Therefore, you can see that the document’s title, header, and footer cannot be modified, while other parts are modifiable.

6. Because this is a dynamic document, we can call many VRO variable contents here to get data. The VRO system has already provided us with some examples. In this cloned document, if you observe these texts carefully, you will find that some text content is surrounded by []. This part is the dynamic variable content in this document. This editing is slightly different from our normal Word editing. Let’s see how to perform the operations. To edit this variable data, first we can input a text content in the normal way. To distinguish it from ordinary text, it is recommended to add [] just like the VAO default document, such as: [Hi, I am a variable]. In the toolbar above, find Developer and open Design Mode.

7. After opening Design Mode, you will find that this document becomes very strange, with much previously hidden content now visible. Don’t be scared by this additional content - it doesn’t actually exist and will automatically hide when you close Design Mode. This is just the result of our variable settings. Next, we set up [Hi, I am a variable]. Select this text, then click the first Aa button to the left of Design Mode to turn this text into a variable like those in the template. Then click Properties below Design Mode to open the variable setting dialog box. It is implemented using Word’s content controls. Setting the properties of this content control completes the process.

8. This variable setting is very simple - you only need to enter a title and a tag. Generally, these two should be set the same, with the title filled in according to the tag content. VRO has built-in the following available tags. All tags start with "~". Select the needed tag and fill it into the property box above, then click OK.

   Variable Name	Description
   ~Created	Report generation time
   ~TimeZone	Report generation time zone
   ~PlanType	VAO plan type
   ~PlanName	VAO plan name
   ~PlanDescription	VAO plan description
   ~PlanContactName	Disaster recovery plan contact name
   ~PlanContactEmail	Disaster recovery plan contact email
   ~PlanContactTel	Disaster recovery plan contact phone
   ~Site	Site name
   ~SiteScopeName	Site scope name
   ~SiteDescription	Site description
   ~SiteContactName	Site contact name
   ~SiteContactEmail	Site contact email
   ~SiteContactTel	Site contact phone
   ~ServerName	Server name
   ~VmsInPlan	Virtual machines in this plan
   ~GroupsInPlan	Virtual machine groups in this plan
   ~ReportType	Report type
   ~TargetRTO	Target expected RTO for this plan
   ~TargetRPO	Target expected RPO for this plan

9. After finishing writing this document according to your needs, you only need to save or close this file normally to submit the document to the VRO server. Be sure not to use “Save As” - after using “Save As”, it will not update to the VRO server, and this editing will be wasted.

After the Report Template editing is completed, you can return to the VRO web UI to view the modification results. Administrators can also select and use this newly created Report Template for different Orchestration Plans based on different Scope settings.

The above covers all the content of VRO. I hope this helps everyone understand VRO better. Thank you for your attention and reading!