Salt Pillars are key elements to have parametric Salt State files allowing them to be more flexible and reusable. Here is an introduction to Salt PillarContinue readingvRA SaltStack Config – Pillars
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Author: Paolo Romagnoli
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vRA SaltStack Config – Top Files
So far we played with Salt State files to apply configurations to Minions and we learned that these are generic by design and describe only what configuration should be achieved. And we used the concept of Targeting to specify where one, or more, State should be applied. In this post I’ll try to cover a different…Continue readingvRA SaltStack Config – Top Files
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Decentralized IT, real life experiences
In an average working week I meet (or better Zoom, Teams, …) with an average of 10/12 different customer ops teams randomly ranging from the large-enterprise to the tiny company. Here is something I am seeing happening more and more throughout the spectrum of all the companies that develop their own software regardless their size…Continue readingDecentralized IT, real life experiences
vRealize Automation is made up of multiple components, one of them is Code Stream that allows users to automate application and infrastructure delivery process with release pipelinemanagement, including visibility and analytics into active pipelines and their status for troubleshooting. To be honest I was not a fan of Code Stream and when a customer engagement…Continue readingPipeline Automation with vRealize Automation (Code Stream)
Salt relies on files (e.g. State files, Reactor config files, Pillars, etc.), for this reason it comes with a simple file server suitable for distributing files to the Salt Minions. The file server is a stateless ZeroMQ server that comes with the Salt Master. The main goal of the Salt file server is to present…Continue readingvRA SaltStack Config – Configure git fileserver
These are the early days of the integration between vRealize Automation and vRealize Automation SaltStack Config (formerly know as SaltStack Enterprise) and some things are yet to come. For instance, today in the 8.4 version if you deprovision a VM in vRA the related Salt Minion key is not deleted in vRA SaltStack Config, this…Continue readingConsume vRA SaltStack Config API in vRA Extensibility
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vRA SaltStack Config – Install with vRLCM
vRA SaltStack Config supports two installation methods: Standard installation – Installs the architectural components needed for SaltStack Config in four or more separate nodes. vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRLCM) installation – Installs SaltStack Config and all of its architectural components on a single node. This method also installs the Salt master host and configures a required vRealize Automation property group. In this blog post…Continue readingvRA SaltStack Config – Install with vRLCM
In the previous post we introduced State Files and explored a bit how they allow a declarative approach to configuration management. We also covered how States Files can be applied to Targets through Commands and Jobs and we will explore in the future the concept of Highstate. All of this is human initiated: an operator…Continue readingvRA SaltStack Config – Event-Driven Automation
So far we covered SaltStack remote execution (do you remember the command salt myminionid pkg.install httpd and the Salt Execution Module? If not check this post) which is great and powerful, but it is more suited for spot activities. Actually when you have to manage complex systems configuration at scale you need a combination of…Continue readingvRA SaltStack Config – Declarative Configuration Management
Targeting Targeting is how you select Salt Minions when running commands, applying configurations, and when doing almost anything else in Salts that involves a Salt Minion. You define a Minions Target by matching against hostnames or system information or defined groups, or even combinations of the previous. Globbing As we have seen in my previous…Continue readingvRA SaltStack Config – Targeting Minions and Jobs