In the previous post (here), we looked into Getting Started with SaltStack Config. We created and kicked off a few tasks from the web interface. Occasionally we’ll need to report on some data as well. The web interface offers the ability to download many result/output tables as CSV or JSON, but what if we wanted to do something with that data programmatically? Fortunately there is an API available (documentation here: https://developer.vmware.com/apis/1179/saltstack-config-raas). Unfortunately, I couldn’t find many examples of consuming this API with PowerShell and ran into an issue as I was getting started (related to credentials). Once I got those sorted out, I was able to create a quick inventory script that I wanted (to simply return minion names & a few “grains” like the Operating System & OS Version). However, with the bit of info I picked up along the way, I decided to try and wrap things up into a PowerShell Module for future needs. This module is available on GitHub (https://github.com/vmware/PowerCLI-Example-Scripts/tree/master/Modules/SaltStackConfig) and the following post will focus on how to get started using that module.

The first step to using this SaltStackConfig module is to get the required files to the system where you run scripts. The easiest way I know to do this is to download the full project repo (there is a Code > Download ZIP button at https://github.com/vmware/PowerCLI-Example-Scripts). With the zip file downloaded, I like to right click and see if the ‘unblock’ button appears in the bottom right — if so, I uncheck that (doing this prior to unzipping the file will save some time as we don’t need to recursively run Unblock-File on everything that was extracted).

I then extract the files I need, in this case the folder Modules\SaltStackConfig and place them in one of the PowerShell Module paths (to find where these are, you can open a powershell window and type $env:PSModulePath).

With the module copied into one of the correct paths, it will load automatically the next time we start PowerShell. Once we have that new PowerShell session, with the module now available, we can connect to the SaltStack Config environment. This cmdlet will connect to the RaaS API and create a global variable that we can reference to use future API calls (for this PowerShell session only).

C:\> Connect-SscServer 'salt.example.com' -User 'root' -Password 'VMware1!'

Here is the sample inventory task I was interested in that started everything:

C:\> (Get-SscMinionCache).grains |Select-Object host, osfullname, osrelease |Sort-Object host

host             osfullname                               osrelease
----             ----------                               ---------
cm-vrssc-01      VMware Photon OS                         3.0
core-control-21  Microsoft Windows Server 2022 Standard   2022Server
dr-control-01    Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Standard   2016Server
raspberrypi      Raspbian                                 10
svcs-sql-01      Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Standard   2016Server
t147-ubuntu-01   Ubuntu                                   20.04
t147-ubuntu-02   Ubuntu                                   20.04
t147-ubuntu18-01 Ubuntu                                   18.04
t147-win22-01    Microsoft Windows Server 2022 Standard   2022Server

I liked how the osfullname property looked for Windows machines, but for the Ubuntu & Photon releases I wanted to combine the osfullname and osrelease columns, so I went with a slightly modified Select-Object statement that contains some if/else logic that pulled together the output exactly how I wanted to display it:

C:\> (Get-SscMinionCache).grains | Select-Object host, @{Name='FriendlyOSName';Expression={ if ($_.osfullname -match 'Windows' ) { $_.osfullname } else { "$($_.osfullName) $($_.osrelease)"}}} | Sort-Object host

host             FriendlyOSName
----             --------------
cm-vrssc-01      VMware Photon OS 3.0
core-control-21  Microsoft Windows Server 2022 Standard
dr-control-01    Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Standard
raspberrypi      Raspbian 10
svcs-sql-01      Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Standard
t147-ubuntu-01   Ubuntu 20.04
t147-ubuntu-02   Ubuntu 20.04
t147-ubuntu18-01 Ubuntu 18.04
t147-win22-01    Microsoft Windows Server 2022 Standard

I decided to write a couple other wrapper functions for some other API methods that I thought I might end up using. In the next few sections I’ll show how to find a specific job that was run, the activity around that job, and the specific results from the execution.

In Task 2 of the previous post (https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/scripting/getting-started-with-saltstack-config), we created a job to push BgInfo to our test servers. This function will return all jobs, but we’ll filter the output to just entries that contain bginfo. The syntax will be Get-SscJob | Where-Object {$_.name -match 'bginfo'} and sample output would look like this:

uuid     : b39de5cb-d01c-4cc7-a886-c746ae2b4150
name     : EnterpriseAdmins BGInfo Test
desc     :
cmd      : local
tgt_uuid : e98739a9-a058-42a3-b3e4-73450de38ced
fun      : state.apply
arg      : @{arg=System.Object[]; kwarg=; hiddenArgsObj=}
masters  : {}
metadata : @{auth=}
tgt_name : zCustomWinServerT147

When we ran that job, it generated some activity on our SSC appliance. We’ll find that specific activity by looking for only the entries where the Job_UUID matches the output from the above command, and since we may have ran the task multiple times, we’ll also filter it for only instances started in the last couple of days. The syntax will be Get-SscActivity | Where-Object {$_.job_uuid -eq 'b39de5cb-d01c-4cc7-a886-c746ae2b4150' -AND $_.start_time -gt '2021-12-20'}

jid             : 20211222185741967000
state           : completed_all_successful
cmd             : local
user            : bwuchner
user_uuid       : 6fe029b6-9e2e-4501-8c57-1776084bd3a8
job_uuid        : b39de5cb-d01c-4cc7-a886-c746ae2b4150
job_name        : EnterpriseAdmins BGInfo Test
job_desc        :
tgt_uuid        : e98739a9-a058-42a3-b3e4-73450de38ced
tgt_name        : zCustomWinServerT147
tgt_desc        :
tgt_type        : compound
tgt             : G@os:Windows and G@nodename:t147-win22-01
sched_uuid      :
sched_name      :                                                                                                       fun             : state.apply                                                                                           is_highstate    : False                                                                                                 job_source      : raas                                                                                                  expected        : 1
returned        : 1
not_returned    : 0
returned_good   : 1                                                                                                     returned_failed : 0                                                                                                     duration        :                                                                                                       masters_to      : {salt}                                                                                                masters_done    : {salt}
create_time     : 2021-12-22T18:58:02.307191
origination     : Ad-Hoc
start_time      : 2021-12-22T18:57:41.96700Z

And finally, we’ll want to find the status of all the data returned from that job. We’ll get the JID value from above and include it in a filter to the last function we’ll be covering. The final example syntax is: (Get-SscReturn -jid 20211222185741967000).full_ret | Select-Object id, success

id                                     success
--                                     -------
t147-win22-01.lab.enterpriseadmins.org    True

These are just a few examples, but each function includes some help, so feel free to use PowerShell help to get any usage examples for the other functions. For reference, here is a short list of the initial wrapper functions available:

C:\> Get-Command -Module SaltStackConfig

CommandType     Name                                               Version    Source
-----------     ----                                               -------    ------
Function        Connect-SscServer                                  0.0.5      SaltStackConfig
Function        Disconnect-SscServer                               0.0.5      SaltStackConfig
Function        Get-SscActivity                                    0.0.5      SaltStackConfig
Function        Get-SscData                                        0.0.5      SaltStackConfig
Function        Get-SscJob                                         0.0.5      SaltStackConfig
Function        Get-SscMaster                                      0.0.5      SaltStackConfig
Function        Get-SscMinionCache                                 0.0.5      SaltStackConfig
Function        Get-SscReturn                                      0.0.5      SaltStackConfig
Function        Get-SscSchedule                                    0.0.5      SaltStackConfig

If you run into any issues, or think of another function that would be helpful to have, please feel free to submit an issue on the Github repo at https://github.com/vmware/PowerCLI-Example-Scripts.

I’ve recently started looking at vRealize Automation SaltStack Config in a lab. In this post I’ll step through a rough outline of the lab environment / setup and cover a couple simple tasks that I was able to complete using SaltStack Config (SSC).

In the lab environment I have a vRealize Automation SaltStack Config instance that was deployed using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSLCM). The vRSLCM platform made this very simple — I downloaded the right installer, answered a few simple questions like IP address, DNS servers, default password, etc and when I came back the appliance was running and ready to use.

With my SSC Appliance running, I needed a few Minions to manage. Having a Windows background, I decided to use the Windows minion on a couple of test servers. I ran a silent installer on test systems, using the following syntax:

\\fileserver\mgmt\_agents\Salt-Minion-3004-Py3-AMD64-Setup.exe /master=cm-vrssc-01.lab.enterpriseadmins.org /S

Once the minion was installed, I browsed to Minion Keys > Pending in the appliance web interface and accepted the pending key requests. This allows encrypted communication between the appliance and minions. With the lab setup background out of the way, lets get to the tasks we want to solve.

Task 1: Deploy a custom PowerShell profile

For the first example I wanted to do a single file copy from the SSC appliance to my minions. This could be a configuration file or such, but for demo purposes I decided I would copy a standard PowerShell profile to the machine for all users.

Browse to Config > File Server. In the top left there is a dropdown list that says base or sse. I selected sse and in the path name text box entered enterpriseadmins\powershell\profile.ps1 and changed the file type dropdown from SLS to TXT, pasted in my PowerShell profile (here is an example if you need one: https://github.com/vmware/PowerCLI-Example-Scripts/blob/master/Scripts/At_Your_Fingertips/NewProfile.ps1), and clicked save. This is the file contents that I’d like to copy to all of my minions.

In the same Config > File Server area we will create a new file. This time I left the file type dropdown as SLS and entered enterpriseadmins\powershell\profile.sls. This is the ‘state’ file that is going to contain the instructions of what to copy and where to place it on the minion filesystem, and overwrite if the file already exists. For this file I entered the following:

MyFileCopyTask:
  file.managed:
    - name: 'C:\windows\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\profile.ps1'
    - source: salt://{{ slspath }}/profile.ps1
    - replace: True

With this new state saved, we browse over to Config > Jobs. From here I created a new job with the following criteria:

• Targets = Windows Servers
• Function = state.apply
• Environments = sse
• States = enterpriseadmins.powershell.profile

I saved this new Job and then ran it (by selecting the three dots to the left of the job name & clicking run now). Looking at my minion I see the file was created & contains the expected contents. Launching PowerShell also results in my new profile loading correctly.

This is a pretty simple demo, but does show how we can manage a file on a possibly large group of systems & easily make changes if needed.

Task 2: Installing BgInfo on Windows servers

Many years ago I created a batch file to “install” a BgInfo configuration on servers in a lab. It did a couple file copies and made a registry entry. This allowed me to have the hostname on the desktop so I knew what I was looking at. I don’t run the batch file much anymore, as I just had this configuration baked into a template so it showed up each time a new VM was deployed. This worked well, but what if I ever wanted to swap out that configuration file? I’m not going to manually do this… and now that I have SSC, lets see if we can recreate that wheel.

The first step is get our bginfo.exe file (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/bginfo) copied to all our machines. I could try and have minions try and download this from the internet, but I have a default firewall rule to deny everything, and I may not want clients going to the internet for security reasons. In the above Task 1 example we stored our PowerShell profile on the embedded Salt file server, but it was just text and we could paste it in through the web interface. We can get this working with binary files, its just a bit different process. The first thing we need to do is to ssh to our SSC Appliance. From here we need to make a directory using the command mkdir /srv/salt. In this example /srv already existed and we just created the salt subdirectory. The /srv/salt folder gets served up by the SSC file server. To keep things tidy, I’m going to create another subfolder for my stuff (using the command mkdir /srv/salt/enterpriseadmins). We can then copy our binary file here (using something like WinSCP).

We now need to decide where to store our BgInfo config file (bgi extension) & state file. We could manage this from the web interface and store in the sse path (like the above example) but I decided to keep all of my BgInfo bits in the same path — I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer here, this was just a personal preference. My BgInfo config file is named Lab-Server.bgi and I called my state file bginfo-config.sls, the contents of that file are below:

BGInfo-Executable:
  file.managed:
    - name: 'C:\sysmod\bginfo.exe'
    - source: salt://enterpriseadmins/Bginfo.exe
    - replace: True
    - makedirs: True

BGInfo-Config:
  file.managed:
    - name: 'C:\sysmod\LAB-Server.bgi'
    - source: salt://enterpriseadmins/LAB-Server.bgi
    - replace: True
    - makedirs: True

#Update Registry Key
'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run':
  reg.present:
    - vname: 'LAB-Server-BGInfo'
    - vdata: 'C:\sysmod\bginfo.exe C:\sysmod\lab-server.bgi /SILENT /NOLICPROMPT /timer:0'
    - vtype: REG_SZ

Its important to note that all of these file names / paths are case sensitive. This is probably obvious, but I spent some time troubleshooting it so I figured it was worth mentioning. Once we have all three files in place (Bginfo.exe, LAB-Server.bgi, and bginfo-config.sls) we can configure a job. For criteria on this I used:

• Targets = Windows Servers
• Function = state.apply
• Environments = (leave blank)
• States = enterpriseadmins.bginfo-config

I saved this new Job and then ran it. Looking at my minion I saw the files & registry key were created. The next login resulted in my updated BgInfo config being applied. Update complete — everywhere, all at once. Thanks SaltStack Config!