Looking at http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/xvfb-run.1.html implies that xvfb-run is a wrapper around Xvfb. So, you could certainly use Xvfb without xvfb-run, you just have to pass a lot more arguments / options that xvfb-run would handle for you.
But looking at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/xenial/+package/xvfb (which is the package the man page lists for 16.04LTS), that package should come with xvfb-run.
This package also contains a convenience script called xvfb-run which
simplifies the automated execution of X clients in a virtual server
environment. This convenience script requires the use of the xauth
program.
So, are you sure that if you do apt-get install xvfb, you don't have xvfb-run installed as well? (You might need to install something to get xauth, but I would have expected that to be handled as a dependency)