The VCF Installer appliance is used to deploy either a VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployment. Customers can re-use their existing components (vCenter Server, NSX Manager, VCF Operations or VCF Automation) that have already been deployed or they can start from scratch, deploying all brand new components.
To accommodate the wide range of deployment permutations, the VCF Installer includes a comprehensive set of validations and pre-checks that are performed prior to deploying a new VCF Fleet.
I recently recieved an interesting question on whether the VCF Installer could be deployed just for the purpose of environment validation without deploying anything?
Having worked with the VCF Installer extensively, I knew it had a backend Validation API, but I was not sure how much had to be setup on the VCF Installer before you could use it as such.
After a quick test in my lab, I have found that you only need the VCF Installer appliance deployed and connect it to a VCF Software Depot (Online or Offline) to retrieve the metadata for compatibility checks. You do NOT have to download any of the VVF or VCF binaries for you to run through the pre-check validations as shown in the screenshot above.
Note: If you do not download the VVF/VCF binaries, those pre-checks will fail as expected, but does not block the remainder pre-checks to run.
This is a useful trick as you can deploy the latest VCF Installer in an existing environment, validate and resolve any issues before proceeding with an actual deployment! Lastly, you can also save the generated JSON, which will save you from having to re-enter the information at a later point and that can even serve as your source control of the actual deployment when you are ready.
Thanks for the comment!