Similar to VCF Management Services (VCFMS), VCF Automation (VCFA) can also be deployed to a non-management network using an API workflow. A typically deployment workflow is to first upgrade to VCF 9.1, deploy VCFMS and then deploy VCFA as a Day-N operation using the new VCF Operations Fleet Lifecycle Management (Fleet LCM) capability, located within VCF Operations under Build->Lifecycle->VCF Management.
When using the Fleet LCM UI to deploy VCFA, you will see that the required IP address input uses a CIDR format. This is not ideal for VCFA, which requires exactly 5 IP addresses for the VCF services runtime; the smallest CIDR that meets this requirement is a /29, which ends up consuming 8 IP addresses.
The good news is that we can use the Fleet LCM API to select an alternative vSphere-based network (VLAN or NSX Overlay) and we also get added benefit to use an alternative IP allocation method, which would allow us to specify the exact number of IP Addresses that is required!
Note: This solution is only applicable for brand new deployments of VCFA, for existing Aria Automation 8.x or VCF Automation 9.0.x/9.1.x deployments, the upgrade workflow will use the existing network that VCFA is deployed on and will availabled IP Addresses from that network.
