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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 […]

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vRA SaltStack Config – Event-Driven Automation

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 […]

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vRA SaltStack Config – Declarative Configuration Management

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 […]

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vRA SaltStack Config – Targeting Minions and Jobs

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 […]

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vRA SaltStack Config – Add Minions and Commands

Now that we have our vRA SaltStack Config (with Master) up and running it’s time to start playing with it and the first things to do is to add some minions and issue our first commands. Let’s do this. Before with get started Adding new minions is very straightforward you just need to install the […]

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vRA SaltStack Config – Install

There are two main vRA SaltStack Config installation scenarios: single-node installation and multi-node installation, for more info about installation scenarios, architecture and requirements refer to my previous post about vRA SaltStack Config Architecture. For my lab I pick the single-node installation scenario and this post guides you through this scenario step by step. Hereafter there […]

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vRA SaltStack Config – Architecture

In October 2020 VMware acquired SaltStack that is the company behind Salt: a leading open source project on GitHub with 3K+ members, 10K+ users. The model adopted by SaltStack was based on building adjacent products to the Salt OSS, they provided 3 commercial offerings around Salt: SaltStack Enterprise, SaltStack Comply and SaltStack Protect covering three […]