Guidelines for upgrading Your Aria Automation Config Infrastructure

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

• This article aims on sharing guidelines to be followed when working on upgrading the underlying Aria Automation Config Infrastructure (Salt).

Environment

• VMware Aria Automation Config 8.x

Resolution

Guidelines:

• When upgrading Salt components, the master(s) should always be upgraded first.
• Running minions with versions of Salt newer than their masters is not guaranteed to function as expected, since the minion may include changes that may not yet available in the master.
• Backward compatibility between new masters and old minions will be preserved. Generally, the only exception to this policy is in case of a security vulnerability.
• Always ensure, you're running the latest master plugin available for your respective Raas release to ensure optimal compatibility between Raas and Master.  
• Salt can be upgraded either through your distribution's package manager or via PyPI if you have installed Salt via pip, the package installer for Python.
  Note for SaltStack Enterprise users: If you initially installed Salt using Salt Crystal, you must also upgrade to later versions using Salt Crystal.

Verify Your Salt Version

• You can verify your installed version of Salt in a few ways:
  • rpm -qi salt
  • dpkg-query -l salt\*
  • yum list installed salt\*
  • salt --versions-report
  • salt-call --local test.versions_report
• To check whether your version is supported or not please visit Salt version support lifecycle.

Backup Your Salt Configuration

• Before upgrading your Salt minion or master, it’s a good idea to create a backup of your /etc/salt directory. Creating a copy of the directory will create backups of the configurations as well as the minion and master keys.
• If you have altered your configuration to use alternative directories, you may consider backing those up as well.
• Once you are satisfied that you have valid backup the next step will update your package manager's repository configuration.

Upgrade Salt

• For scenarios and detailed procedures to be followed in each respective scenario, please refer Upgrade Salt