The deployment wizard for VMware Cloud Builder (CB) can accept either an XLSX or JSON configuration file that describes your desired VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment.
Interestingly enough, only an XLSX template is available for users to download, edit and then provide that back as user input. While I can appreciate the rich logic that has been built into the CB workbook, I personally would prefer to work with something a bit more straight forward like JSON, especially for the ability to easily source control via Git/etc.
I have been spending some time with VCF 4.5 and CB this week and I have always wondered if there was a way to convert to JSON format given an XLSX as the initial input. While poking around the logs, I noticed a reference to the following script /opt/vmware/bringup/scripts/json-generator.sh which is used by CB to convert an XLSX to JSON document.
For those that prefer to work with JSON, you can simply fill out the XLSX template once and then convert that to the equilvenet JSON using following instructions
Step 1 - SCP the completed XLSX document to CB. In my example, the XLSX document is called my-vcf-deploy.xlsx
Step 2 - Run the following command specifying the source XLSX, destination JSON and vcf-ems string for VCF deployment:
/opt/vmware/bringup/scripts/json-generator.sh my-vcf-deploy.xlsx my-vcf-deploy.json vcf-ems
Step 3 - SCP the generated JSON configuration file back to your local system and you can now use that as input to CB.
Thanks for the comment!