During a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) bringup, where VMware Cloud Builder is performing deploying the VCF Management Domain, unforeseen issues can occur. Within the Cloud Builder UI or API, if a particular task had failed, you can easily retry the deployment without having to start all over again, which is certainly something I have benefited more than once!
When you retry the bringup workflow, it is using the original bringup specification which from the Cloud Builder UI can either be the VCF Deployment Workbook (XLS) or VCF Deployment Spec (JSON), which is to be expected as you are attempting to retry the exact same deployment.
However, in some cases you might need to adjust the bringup specification or if you made a typo but this is typically not allowed during a retry operation and would require a complete re-deployment. While deploying the newest VCF 5.1 release, I was testing out a new deployment scenario where I needed to append additional entries into the VCF Deployment JSON spec and I came to learn from one of our Engineers that I did not have to blow away the setup, but that I could retry using a modified bringup spec when using the Cloud Builder API!
