VM Profiles¶

Salt cloud designates virtual machines inside the profile configuration file. The profile configuration file defaults to /etc/salt/cloud.profiles and is a yaml configuration. The syntax for declaring profiles is simple:

fedora_rackspace:
    provider: rackspace
    image: Fedora 17
    size: 256 server
    script: bootstrap-salt

It should be noted that the script option defaults to bootstrap-salt, and does not normally need to be specified. Further examples in this document will not show the script option.

A few key pieces of information need to be declared and can change based on the public cloud provider. A number of additional parameters can also be inserted:

centos_rackspace:
    provider: rackspace
    image: CentOS 6.2
    size: 1024 server
    minion:
        master: salt.example.com
        append_domain: webs.example.com
        grains:
            role: webserver

The image must be selected from available images. Similarly, sizes must be selected from the list of sizes. To get a list of available images and sizes use the following command:

salt-cloud --list-images openstack
salt-cloud --list-sizes openstack

Some parameters can be specified in the main Salt cloud configuration file and then are applied to all cloud profiles. For instance if only a single cloud provider is being used then the provider option can be declared in the Salt cloud configuration file.

Multiple Configuration Files¶

In addition to /etc/salt/cloud.profiles, profiles can also be specified in any file matching cloud.profiles.d/*conf which is a sub-directory relative to the profiles configuration file(with the above configuration file as an example, /etc/salt/cloud.profiles.d/*.conf). This allows for more extensible configuration, and plays nicely with various configuration management tools as well as version control systems.

Larger Example¶

rhel_ec2:
    provider: ec2
    image: ami-e565ba8c
    size: t1.micro
    minion:
        cheese: edam

ubuntu_ec2:
    provider: ec2
    image: ami-7e2da54e
    size: t1.micro
    minion:
        cheese: edam

ubuntu_rackspace:
    provider: rackspace
    image: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
    size: 256 server
    minion:
        cheese: edam

fedora_rackspace:
    provider: rackspace
    image: Fedora 17
    size: 256 server
    minion:
        cheese: edam

cent_linode:
    provider: linode
    image: CentOS 6.2 64bit
    size: Linode 512

cent_gogrid:
    provider: gogrid
    image: 12834
    size: 512MB

cent_joyent:
    provider: joyent
    image: centos-6
    size: Small 1GB