VCF 9.1 - Quick Tip: Understanding VCF Installer Default Behavior for VCF Patch Releases

With the first Expression Patch (9.1.0.0100) now available for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1, I was wondering about version selection behavior (UI and API/JSON) within the VCF Installer.

The VCF Installer UI will automatically select the latest VCF release (e.g. 9.1.0) along with the latest available patch version for each VCF component (e.g. 9.1.0.0100). As shown in the screenshot below, not every component has an EP01 release, but the VCF Installer automatically selects the most recent version, which is exactly the behavior I would expect as a user.

If you need to override a specific component version, you can select from the available drop down.

For the API/JSON behavior, I had to check with Engineering since I wanted to deploy using the latest EP01 components. Luckily, the behavior in the API/JSON is behaving exactly the way I had also hoped, which is that if you do NOT specify a specific version, it will simply default to the component versions you have downloaded.

This also means that the VCF component versions downloaded through the VCF Installer will drive the actual versions used during deployment, without having to explicitly specify them in your VCF deployment JSON. If you happen to have multiple versions of a VCF component downloaded and want to deploy a specific version, you can include the version property for that component, as shown in the example below.

"vcfOperationsCollectorSpec": {
  "applianceSize": "small",
  "hostname": "vcf-proxy01.vcf.lab",
  "rootUserPassword": "VMware1!VMware1!",
  "useExistingDeployment": false,
  "version": "9.1.0"
}