Veeam makes available, for free, Visio stencils available from their website here which are useful for creating Veeam diagrams in Microsoft Visio. These stencils enable specific Veeam components to be illustrated in greater detail instead of relying on generic stencils found in the stock Visio library. I’ve been using these Veeams stencils for several years now while they’ve proven themselves to be beneficial they aren’t short of a few quirks and issues.
Recently, a colleague of mine, David Summers, mentioned he has been working on improving the Azure Visio stencils and could help improve the Veeam stencils the same tool he has developed. For those interested, David has had quite an interesting journey around Azure Services Visio stencils which is definitely worth a read over at his GitHub David-Summers/Azure-Design
After passing the Veeam stencils through his tool, the following changes were implemented.
- Icons are now sorted alphabetically
- New connections points have been added (North/North East/East/South East/etc)
- New Connection points are relative to the centre/size of each icon
- Text box is now placed at the bottom of each stencil icon, instead of the middle
- Text box will now dynamically resize it’s width and height based on the amount of text
- To make icons stand out, drop shadow has been enabled on all icons, this is a personal preference and can easily be disabled
- Bonus PNG and SVG icons have been split out so third-party programs outside of Visio that support PNG and SVG can make use of them
The improved Veeam Visio stencils can be downloaded below;