How to Upgrade Salt Crystal

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Salt Crystal is a package including Salt Master, Salt Minion, and all dependencies, that is used as an alternative to installing Salt through your distribution's package manager or via PyPI. Using Salt Crystal is intended for users installing or upgrading Salt in an air-gapped environment, provided as an offline installer RPM within our SaltStack Enterprise installer.

When upgrading Salt, always upgrade the masters first. If you run minions with a version of Salt newer than their masters, your Salt installation is not guaranteed to function as expected since the minion may include changes not yet available on the master. Also, whenever possible, 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.

Backup your Salt configuration

Before upgrading your Salt Minion or Salt Master that was installed via Salt Crystal, a best practice is to create a backup of your /opt/saltstack/etc 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 a valid backup, the next step is to update your Salt Crystal package.

Upgrading Salt Crystal

1. Download the latest SaltStack Enterprise installer zip archive along with the "VMware vRealize Automation SaltStack Config 8.6.0 Automated Installer" package. You can access this through the Customer Connect portal
   1. Link to Customer Connect Portal
2. File name will be in the following format: SaltStack_Enterprise-<version>_Installer.zip
3. Extract sse-installer/saltstack-crystal-<new-version>.rpm from the archive, and push to the instance running Salt Crystal.
4. Run the following to upgrade Salt Crystal:

# Stop the master and minion services
systemctl stop salt-minion
systemctl stop salt-master

# Verify the installed package (it will have crystal in the name)
yum list installed salt\*crystal\*
yum remove saltstack-crystal-<old-version>
yum install saltstack-crystal-<new-version>.rpm --nogpgcheck

# Re-enable and restart services
systemctl -q enable salt-master.service
systemctl -q enable salt-minion.service

# Start Services
systemctl start salt-master
systemctl start salt-minion

With Salt now updated, make sure to verify your configuration is intact, and restore from backups of /opt/saltstack/etc if necessary.

Environment

VMware Aria Automation Config 8.12.x