Manually Deploy Salt Minion
In a series of posts, I am going to take you through setting up the Automation Config product, manually enabling management of deployed systems, creating a custom desired state and eventually integrating with your Cloud templates.
This specific post will demonstrate how to install the Salt Minion on an existing Ubuntu virtual machine.
Preparation
To follow along with this blog post, ensure that the following requirements are met.
Requirements
- Ubuntu virtual machine 1 cpu, 4GB ram and 40GB for the disk.
- Ubuntu virtual machine has internet access
- VMware Aria Automation Config has been deployed
- Communication between the Aria Automation Config server and the ubuntu virtual machine is established (i.e. firewall configuration is correct)
Install the Agent
Open a console or Putty session into your ubuntu virtual machine.
We can install the salt minion agent directly from the standard repository using the following command
sudo apt-get install salt-minion
Once installed, we need to edit the minion configuration file so the minion knows where the Aria Automation Config server is.
sudo nano /etc/salt/minion
Near the top of the file, you will see a line starting with #master. This line should be uncommented and the FQDN of your master server appended. In my case, it looks like the below. Once you have edited the file, save it and exit it.
To adopt the change in the configuration, we need to restart the minion service. We can do this with the following command.
sudo service salt-minion restart
After a few minutes, log into the Aria Automation Configuration interface, using the internal admin account (for this part we need a user with the salt master role).
Expand the Minion Keys section of the menu and click the Pending option. You will see your ubuntu server listed.
Click the checkbox next to the ubuntu server and click the ACCEPT KEY button.
Click ACCEPT KEY in the popup dialog.
From the navigation menu, select the Minions option and then All Minions. Your ubuntu server is now ready to be used with Aria Automation Config.
