Salt-minion deployment failed on VM with ERROR: 'Unable to execute command'

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)
• VMware Salt

Issue/Introduction

• Deploying the salt-minion on a Windows VM using the command salt-cloud -p <profile> <VM-Name> -l debug returns the following error:

  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/saltstack/salt/lib/python3.10/site-packages/salt/utils/cloud.py", line 1032, in wait_for_psexecsvc
  stdout, stderr, ret_code = run_psexec_command(
  File "/opt/saltstack/salt/lib/python3.10/site-packages/salt/utils/cloud.py", line 989, in run_psexec_command
  with Client(
  File "/opt/saltstack/salt/lib/python3.10/site-packages/salt/utils/cloud.py", line 898, in _init
  self. client = Pstxecclient(server, username, password, port, encrypt)
  NameError: name 'PsExecClient' is not defined
  [DEBUG] Retrying psexec connection to host ##.##.#.## on port 445 (try 1)
  [ERROR] Unable to execute command

• The command salt-pip show pypsexec returns the following message:

  WARNING: Package(s) not found: pypsexec

Environment

Aria Automation Config 8.x

Cause

This issue occurs by the missing PsExecClient module, a required prerequisite for minion installation.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, follow these steps on the Salt master server as the root user:

1. Install the smbprotocol and pypsexec packages using the following commands:

   salt-pip install smbprotocol
   salt-pip install pypsexec

2. Confirm the package installation using the following command:

   salt-pip list | egrep -i "smbprotocol|pypsexec"

3. Re-initiate the salt-minion deployment.
   Note: Running this command requires having installed salt-cloud from the Salt repository.

   salt-cloud -p <profile> <VM-Name> -l debug

Additional Information

Add the SaltStack Config resource to the cloud template

The master plugin includes a "vendored" version of the saltify driver from salt-cloud. If you install salt-cloud on your Salt master, you can then re-run any failed minion deployment if the VM still exists using a command like salt-cloud -p /etc/salt/cloud.profiles.d/.<MINION_DEPLOYMENT_ID> .conf -l debug. You can confirm the information is accurate before proceding and confirm the "deploy" option is set to "True". 

More information about salt-cloud and the Saltify driver are available here: Saltify Driver for Salt-Cloud command