Before you start

To complete the hands-on examples for Tanzu Salt, first ensure that you have the necessary background information to complete them as explained in the following sections. Then, set up your environment by installing Tanzu Salt and ensuring you have access to the required resources.

Required background knowledge

These examples are written for IT system administrators and/or DevOps team members with the general knowledge and experience required in these fields.

These examples also assume that you have some basic familiarity with some of the basic concepts and common terms used in Salt and Tanzu Salt, such as the relationship between the Salt master and Salt minion, what a job is, what a state file is, etc. For more information, see:

• Tanzu Salt architecture
• Salt user guide

Set up Tanzu Salt

To complete these hands-on examples, you need access to an on-premises or SaaS deployment of Tanzu Salt.

For information on setting up Tanzu Salt, see Getting Started with Tanzu Salt.

Confirm you have access to the required resources

After installing and configuring Tanzu Salt, you also need:

• Access to one or more minions or targets.

  Either you need the ability to create new targets in Tanzu Salt or you need access to at least one target that you can use for this tutorial. You can check whether you have access by selecting Targets on the side menu to open the Targets workspace. If you don’t see any minions listed in the All Minions table, it could mean you don’t have sufficient permissions.

  If you do see some minions, also check to ensure that these minions display their status as Present.

• Access to create jobs or run the types of jobs used in these examples.

  To check whether you can create jobs or have access to any jobs, select Config > Jobs from the side menu to open the Jobs workspace. If you don’t see any jobs listed or the Create Jobs button, it could mean you don’t have sufficient permissions.

• Access to at least one minion running a Windows operating system and one running a CentOS operating system. This access is only needed to complete examples 3 and 4.

  Ensure that you use nodes that are not crucial to your environment, such as those that are part of a testing and development environment. Also confirm that these nodes are connected to Tanzu Salt and that their keys are accepted.

If you don’t have sufficient permissions or access to resources, contact your VMware Aria Automation administrator to discuss whether you can have the access you need to complete this tutorial.

The administrator can potentially give you access to a minion or target that is not crucial to production and can create the jobs listed in this tutorial and give you access to run these jobs on a target.

Alternatively, you could ask for temporary access to the resources and tasks needed to complete the tutorial for a designated window of time.