Debuging minion deployment by Aria Automation using salt-cloud

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

When deploying a template with cloud.saltstack component fails on deploy minion task. In VRA UI you might see the error similar to this one 

Resource [/resources/compute/AAAAAAAA-AAAA-AAAA-AAAA-AAAAAAAAAAAA]: SaltStack resource with job id [BBBBBBBB-BBBB-BBBB-BBBB-BBBBBBBBBBBB] failed.

Error:: 2024-10-29T10:31:04.538008: Minion deployment started. JID - 20241029103104507238 |

2024-10-29T10:35:49.473648: Minion deployment failed. JID - 20241029103104507238 |

2024-10-29T10:35:49.474096: Minion deployment and/or state file run failed. 

 

Environment

Aria Automation 8.X

Aria Automation Config Appliance 8.X

 

Resolution

Debugging Steps

If the deploy.minion job fails but the target machine is up and reachable, use salt-cloud to debug the deployment process.

1. Find the cloud.profile configuration for the minion

SSH to the Salt master (may be the same as the RaaS node) node and locate the _profile file in the /etc/salt/cloud.profiles.d/ directory.

Example profile content (redacted):

example_profile:
  deploy: true
  minion:
    master:
    - <salt-master-id>
  password: <password>
  priv_key: ''
  provider: _provider
  pub_key: ''
  script_args: ' -x python3 stable 3005.5 '
  ssh_host: <IP-of-minion-host>
  ssh_username: <>

2. Enable deployment in the profile

Edit the profile file and ensure the deploy parameter is set to true:

deploy: true

3. Run the salt-cloud command

Execute the following command to attempt the deployment manually with debug logging:

salt-cloud -p <profile-name> <minionID> -l debug

• <profile-name>: The name of the profile file in /etc/salt/cloud.profiles.d/ (excluding the .conf extension).
• <minionID>: Any unique identifier for the test.

4. Analyze the logs

Review the console output to identify the cause of failure. Common issues include:

• No route to host: The Salt master cannot reach the minion on port 22 (Linux).

  [DEBUG ] Attempting connection to host <minion_host> on port 22
  [DEBUG ] Caught exception in wait_for_port: [Errno 113] No route to host

• Authentication issues: The connection is established, but SSH authentication fails or times out.
• Download failures: The minion fails to retrieve installation files from the repository (e.g., repo.saltproject.io).

  [DEBUG ] * ERROR: https://repo.saltproject.io/... failed to download to /tmp/salt-gpg-[REDACTED].pub
  [DEBUG ] * ERROR: Failed to run install_centos_stable_deps()!!!