Upgrade Salt Master on vRA SSC Appliance

vRealize Automation SaltStack Config (vRA SSC) appliance is managed using the vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM), this makes easy management activities such as install and upgrade. However, when upgrading vRA SSC it only upgrades SaltStack Config console, while for compatibility reason it doesn’t update the Salt Master installed on the appliance. As updating the Master can impact State files operations (think about deprecated functionalities), it is up to the user to update the Salt Master if and when it makes sense for the user to do it.

Updating Salt is a simple and very well documented process, among many documentation options I would point you to this VMware KB article. So why writing a post about this? Well, vRA SSC appliance is based on Photon OS that leverages tdnf as default package manager and unfortunately there is no (at least I was not able to find) instructions for this distro / package manager combo. So, here you go!

Before upgrading Salt it is wise take a snapshot of your vRA SSC VM, and then you can ssh into the appliance and run the following command to download and cache metadata for enabled repositories:

tdnf makecache

You can now run the upgrade command, please note that this upgrades both Master and Minion:

tdnf upgrade salt3-master

In my lab I am running Salt 3002.5 and I am upgrading to the most recent version at the time of this post (3004.1):

Restart your Salt Master:

systemctl restart salt-master

Check the Master is updated to the latest version:

salt-master -V

Restart your minion:

systemctl restart salt-minion

Check the Minion is also updated to the latest version:

salt-minion -V

You can also check the Minion upgrade is reflected into the vRA SSC Console. Access your vRA SSC UI and browse to Minions > All Minions:

Hope this can be helpful for you!