Using two or more Salt masters for minion deployments

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

The scenario is that you a team that manages Aria Automation and VM life cycle. However, you have another team that needs to be able to leverage Salt for managing their own applications, or development work. Therefore, your organization needs to allow another team to fully manage VM's via Salt once they are deployed as part of their life cycle.

Environment

Aria Config 8.14+

Resolution

The second master should be able to be configured just like the existing Salt master. This will require it's own blueprint in Aria Automation in order to run states from a blueprint against any minion connected to that Salt master. Since the Salt masters are not connected to each other in any way, some state files that are expected to exist on each Salt master may require manually copying files between the masters. In the event that the other team attempts to run a state file, it will only work as long as the files have been copied over from the primary master. Both Salt masters will be able to see all files from the Aria Config server that are stored in any environment if they use the saltenv option to specify the environment from where to search for files. 

1. Install and configure a second master so that it is connected to Aria Config with its own ID and/cluster ID
   1. Setting a cluster ID in this case is optional
2. Clone the existing blueprint in Aria Automation and configure the blueprint to use the new master for deployments
3. Grant access to the second Salt master in the UI and optionally via SSH
4. Configure targets in the UI to limit access to the Salt minions deployed to the second Salt master only.