Getting Started with SaltStack Config

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!

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2 Responses to Getting Started with SaltStack Config

  1. Pingback: Getting Started with SaltStackConfig PowerShell Module – Enterprise Admins.org

  2. Pingback: vExpert Cloud Management December 2021 Blog Digest - Möbius Business Technologies Ltd.

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