How to download offline VSAN HCL file for VSAN Health Check Plugin?

One of the coolest features in the new VSAN Health Check Plugin is the automatic verification of your underlying hardware (hosts, disks, storage controller & drivers) by automatically checking it against VMware's VSAN HCL (Hardware Compatibility List).

The VSAN HCL database can either be downloaded automatically from VMware.com or manually uploaded if you do not have direct or proxy internet access. There was a question this morning on Twitter asking where the offline VSAN HCL file be downloaded from? I was actually curious as well and looking at Cormac Hogan's excellent VSAN Health Check documentation, I found the answer at the very end of the document 🙂

http://partnerweb.vmware.com/service/vsan/all.json

To download the offline VSAN HCL file which is actually is just a JSON file, you just need to load the above URL into a web browser and then save the file.

After you have downloaded the VSAN HCL file, you can either upload using the vSphere Web Client under the "Health" section of the VSAN Health Plugin or you using the following RVC command and specifying the path to the file:

vsan.health.hcl_update_db /localhost/ -l /root/all.json

As a bonus, I also had some fun parsing the VSAN HCL JSON file. Below is a graph that I was able to generate after extracting some useful information using the following script found here.