Setting the minion id of a salt-minion when deploying VM from an Aria Automation blueprint and using Aria Orchestrator to set the hostname

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

When deploying a salt minion from a Aria Automation blueprint it is possible to set the minion id in the Cloud.SaltStack definition of the blueprint using the id   parameter in the additionalMinionParams section of the Cloud.SaltStack definition as seen below. However, if an Aria Orchestrator workflow is used to set the name of the machine then Aria Automation does not have access to that name as the workflow runs after the blueprint YAML has been evaluated. This is to say there is no ${...} statement in the blueprint YAML that can be references that evaluates to the name the the Aria Orchestrator workflow will set when it runs later in the build process. 

 

  Cloud_SaltStack_1:
    type: Cloud.SaltStack
    properties:
      ...
      additionalMinionParams:
        id: ...
    ...

Environment

Aria Automation all version

Aria Automation Config all versions

Resolution

The easiest way to resolve this issue it to not specify the id   parameter in the additionalMinionParams section of the Cloud.SaltStack definition. By doing this, when the salt-minion is deployed it will use the hostname of the vm as the minion id.