The Lab Factory

Catalog items that build whole VCF instances, and the unglamorous plumbing that keeps them honest: plan mode, porting a deploy script, property groups, request forms and checks before anyone presses Request. For platform engineers who would rather press a button than follow a runbook. Start with One catalog item, one VCF instance.

One catalog item, one VCF instance: building a lab factory

How an interactive PowerShell script grew into a catalog item that builds complete nested VCF 9.1 instances from one request form. The design rules that made it survivable, and the traps behind them.

One checkbox on every form: validateOnly. Tick everything, plan the whole stack, change nothing.

validateOnly everywhere: plan mode for infrastructure

Terraform has plan. Kubernetes has –dry-run. Your vRO workflows have nothing, unless you give them a validateOnly input and pass it down. The most valuable checkbox in the lab factory.

Porting a PowerShell deploy script to a catalog item: the mapping table is the post

A 400-line menu-driven PowerShell script became a cloud template, two vRO actions and two subscriptions. Where each behaviour belongs, four non-obvious decisions, and the ‘yes’ that isn’t ’true’.

Spec derived from X, validated by the installer, bringup started, task id returned; a second run polls without the catalog's leash

Driving the VCF Installer API from vRO: generate, validate, start, walk away

Stage 2 of the lab factory: a vRO workflow turns an environment number into a VCF 9.1 deployment spec, validates it and starts bringup, because the request dies long before the eight-hour build does.