While trying to create an Active Directory diagram at work the other day I stumbled across a great tool from Microsoft for automating that process. The Active Directory Topology Diagrammer was released in Oct 2007 but I hadn’t heard of it before. It’s a simple utility that will read AD structure and output a Visio diagram of AD domain topology, site topology, OU structure, and even your Exchange Server Organization structure. There are several options in the GUI that can be selected to determine what is queried and what is displayed in the output. The diagrams are pretty good, sometimes needing some minor formatting, but still a major time saver over trying to create them manually. Find it here on Microsoft.com (it also requires Visio).

The Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer is a really useful tool when documenting Active Directory domains of any size.

With the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool, you can read your Active Directory structure through Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO). The Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool automates Microsoft Visio to draw a diagram of the Active Directory Domain topology, your Active Directory Site topology, your OU structure or your current Exchange 200X Server Organization.

With the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool, you can also draw partial information from your Active Directory, like only one Domain or one site. The objects are linked together, and arranged in a reasonable layout that you can later interactively work with the objects in Microsoft Visio.

The Diagrammer is very flexible and allows the user to include and exclude granular information such as the following:

1. domain(s) (child etc.)
2. Site(s )
3. OUs
4. Administrative Groups
5. Exchange connectors (Routing, SMTP, X.400, Notes etc.)
6. Users in the domain(s)
7. Trusts
8. User Count
9. Global Catalog servers
10. IP and SMTP Site links
11. Subnets
12. Inter/Intra Site Replication Connections
13. Number of Mailboxes
14. Application Partitions
15. Servers and OS version information (with color coding)

In order for the tool to do a Active Directory discover you need to configure the tool to point to a Global Catalog server in the environment.

Supported operating systems are Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, and Vista. You’l need .NET 2.0 and Visio 2003 or 2007. The Active Directory team has a nice tutorial on how to use this tool, along with the Group Policy Management Console, to document your Active Directory infrastructure.

Para abrir esta sección os voy a recomendar esta utilidad de Microsoft realmente interesante, el ADTD (Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer).

ADTD nos permite generar desde nuestro equipo y mediante el software Microsoft Visio un grafico de nuestra infraestructura de Active Directory de forma automática. La instalación y uso es realmente sencilla. Una vez la tengamos instalada y ejecutada nos permite seleccionar el grado de detalle, pudiendo llegar a mostrar entre otras cosas OU´s, servidores Exchange, conectores de correo, controladores de dominio y los roles que están realizando actualmente.

Una utilidad altamente recomendable que nos permite analizar gráficamente nuestra arquitectura de Active Directory e incluso poder llegar a detectar posibles problemas de diseño de nuestra infraestructura.

Para su ejecucción necesitamos tener instalado .Net Framework 2.0 y Microsoft Visio para dejar al ADTD dibujar a sus anchas.

Puedes descargar esta utilidad desde el siguiente enlace:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=cb42fc06-50c7-47ed-a65c-862661742764&displaylang=en