VCF salt-minion deployments are rebooting unexpectedly, or failing to reboot when requested in the top.sls file

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

• VMware Tools is installed as part of the installation process
• Seen on Windows minions; could also affect Linux minions
• This may be seen as failed minion deployment when created from Aria Automation using a Salt Minion object
• The cause of the deployment failing may be a system.reboot failure
• Possible salt-minion.log ERRORs:
  • msg: A system shutdown is in progress.
  • Request to reboot failed

Environment

• VCF Salt RaaS / Aria Config / VMware Tanzu Guardrails for Workloads / SaltStack Enterprise
• VMware Aria Automation 

Cause

The VMware Tools installation is rebooting the VM as part of automatic / ESX host-based installation.

• KB 405234:  VMware tools may requires additional reboot while installing from ESXi level

If another reboot is attempted while this is ongoing, it may fail with the above errors.

Resolution

Confirmation:

• These commands show the last boot time and can be useful to determine if it had been rebooted during installation:
  • wmic os get lastbootuptime       (Windows)
  • last reboot         (Linux)

 

Resolution:

• Add REBOOT=R as an argument to the setup.exe command in the VMware Tools installation state file
  • Specify VMware Tools Components in Silent Installation