Automation

The lab factory: stage 1 nested hosts, stage 2 bringup, day-N items, one wrapper form

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

How an interactive PowerShell script grew into a catalog-driven factory that stands up complete nested VCF 9.1 instances — hosts, bringup, supervisor, fleet components — from a single request form. The design rules that made it survivable, and the traps that shaped 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 make the wrapper cascade it. A short argument for the single most valuable checkbox in the lab factory, with the failures it caught.