{"id":716,"date":"2021-03-13T19:08:45","date_gmt":"2021-03-13T18:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nine30.info\/?p=716"},"modified":"2021-03-13T19:08:45","modified_gmt":"2021-03-13T18:08:45","slug":"vra-saltstack-config-targeting-minions-and-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nine30.nxt70.com\/index.php\/2021\/03\/13\/vra-saltstack-config-targeting-minions-and-jobs\/","title":{"rendered":"vRA SaltStack Config \u2013 Targeting Minions and Jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Targeting<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Globbing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As we have seen in my previous post<\/a> the simplest way to target is using the Salt minion ID and globbing on the Salt Minion ID by simply including a wildcard in the target. The following example targets all the minions whose hostname starts with “minion”:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

salt 'minion*' disk.usage<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately not always naming convention is there to help or if it is in place and enforced not always is enough for our purposes.  For this reason Salt provides other options for targeting, in these post we’ll go through some options that are a good starting point for our purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Targeting with Grains<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Grains? What are Grains?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grains<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Grains are static information Salt collects about the underlying managed system. Salt collects Grains for the operating system, domain name, IP address, kernel, OS type, memory and many other system properties. In the vRA SaltStack Config you can see all the Grains that are available on a Minion by clicking on the Minion ID wherever it appears in the user interface, once in the Minion details section make sure to scroll down as Grains list is very long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Of course you can also list Grains on a target using the CLI (in the snippet below replace the Minion ID with a valid Minion ID in your environment):<\/p>\n\n\n\n
#lists all grains available on the targeted minion(s)\nsalt minion-web.corp.local grains.ls\n\n#list grains data on the targeted minion(s)\nsalt minion-web.corp.local grains.items\n\n#show data for grain named \"os\" for the targeted minion(s)\nsalt minion-web.corp.local grains.item os<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Here is how outputs looks like, click on each image to enlarge it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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By default Salt provides a good list of Grains, but of course you can add your own Grains to Minions. As usual there are different options to do that: 1) you can statically<\/span> assign custom Grain(s) with configuration files or through CLI and 2) you can dynamically<\/span> assign custom Grain(s) by creating custom grains modules. There is a lot more about Grains capabilities that I cannot cover here, but you can go deeper in this interesting topic and discover more about the power of Grains by starting from here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the purpose of this post we will just add a custom Grain to a Minion using the CLI, the command syntax is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
salt '*' grains.append key val <\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Where key<\/code> is the Grain key to to be appended to and val<\/code> is the value to append to the Grain key. If the Grain key doesn’t exist, the Grain key is added and the value is appended to the new Grain as a list item. With the following command we add a Grain key role<\/code> with value webserver<\/code> to the Minion ID minion-web.corp.local<\/code>. As the Grain role<\/code> doesn’t exist on my Minion it will be created. Please, note that using Globbing Targeting you can apply the same custom Grain to many Minions at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
salt minion-web.corp.local grains.append role webserver<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Here is the outcome:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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You can check the Grain was actually appended only to the targeted Minion either in the user interface or through the CLI as described earlier in this post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now that we are little familiar with Grains we can start targeting with Grains, targeting via a Grain is done by passing the -G<\/code> option to salt, specifying a Grain and a glob expression to match the value of the grain. The syntax for the target is the Grain key followed by a glob expression i.e. \"os:Arch*\"<\/code>. The following example pings only the Minions with Ubuntu operating system:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
salt -G 'os:Ubuntu' test.ping<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
In the example below we check the Minions version of managed machines having assigned webserver role, we do this by leveraging the recently created custom Grain named role<\/code>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Other ways of Targeting<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
There are different ways of targeting that can also be combined together, here is some examples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead of simply globbing, Targets can be filtered by leveraging regular expression by means of the option -E<\/code>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
salt -E 'minion-[0-9]' test.version<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Targets can be explicitly specified in a list by using the -L<\/code> option:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
salt -L 'minion-web.corp.local,minion-ubuntu.corp.local' test.version<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Multiple Target types can be combined in one command compound with the -C<\/code> option:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
salt -C 'G@os:Centos and minion-*' test.version<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Please, note that other targeting methods are available and we are just scratching the surface here, to see more the documentation<\/a> is the place to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Targets in the vRA SaltStack Config User Interface<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Of course Targeting is also available through the User Interface with the same expressive power of the CLI. In addition to this the User Interface allows user to save Targets to be reused. By default Salt provides some out of the box Targets (e.g. CentOS, Linux, MacOS, RedHat, SUSE, Ubuntu, Windows and Windows Servers), but you can easily create your own Targets. You can access Targets by selecting Minions tab and here you can review an existing Targets, for instance Ubuntu by simply clicking on it in the left side list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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If you click on the Edit button you can access the criteria behind this Ubuntu Target, as you can see it is super easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Now, if you want to create a new Target you just need to click on All Targets and then click the Create Target button.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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In this post we are going to create a new Target named Webserver using the custom Grain named Role we created before. As you can see there are some matching options: Grain, List, Glob and Compound and they are pretty self explanatory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Configure the match criteria as in the picture below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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We can also create more complex Targeting by adding one or more match criteria and combine them using basic boolean logic AD, OR and NOT. Click on the button Add Match Criteria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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For our purpose the single match on the Grain role is enough, to remove the additional match criteria just click on the X<\/code> button on the right of the boolean operator. Now, to save your criteria just click on the Save button.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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To test our new Target we can simply click on the Target named Webserver, this should display only Minions having Grain role with value webserver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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We can now use our new Target, to do that we need to introduce a new friend: Job. Don’t worry, there is anything complex here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jobs<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
A Job is how you execute module in vRA SaltStack Config web console. Jobs are the UI counterpart of Salt CLI: remote execution Jobs are created by specifying the module, a function, and any necessary arguments. Having them in web console allows easy reuse of the commands. In vRA SaltStack Config job management consists of several areas:<\/p>\n\n\n\n