topic Forwarders version compatibility with Indexer version 8.x in Splunk Enterprise

Forwarders version compatibility with Indexer version 8.x

PramodhKumar — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 02:41:46 GMT

Hi Folks,

We are having upgrade planned for our clustered environment where we have 400+ forwarders , 14 Int forwarders then Indexers and so on..

As splunk said version 8.x accept connections from forwarders with version 7.x and above.

Notes:
All forwarders running on different versions, 6.x 7.x.
All Intermediate forwarders are on 7.x

So can we proceed with upgrading Indexers to 8.x as literally we receive data feed from Int Forwarders?

Any guidance is highly appreciated

Thanks and Regards,
Pramodh B

Re: Forwarders version compatibility with Indexer version 8.x

gcusello — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 10:31:23 GMT

Hi @PramodhKumar,
as you know, the main rule is that Indexers must have a release equal or higher that forwarders, so I think that you have to start from Indexers Upgrade, then Intermediate Forwarders and then the others.

You'll not have problems in Indexers Upgrade, because Intermediate Forwarders are in 7.x release.

The problem could be when you'll upgrade Intermediate Forwarders because there are other Forwarders in 6.x release and they could have problems.
You can approach this problem in two ways:

upgrade 6.x Forwarders twice:
- upgrade 6.x Forwarders before from 6.x to 7.x (equal to Intermediate Forwarders),
- then upgrade Intermediate Forwarders to 8.x (the same of Indexers),
- finally upgrade all the Forwarders to the 8.x version.
have a downtime during upgrade:
- upgrade Intermediate Forwarders to 8.x ,
- upgrade 6.x Forwarders to 8.x,
- upgrade the other Forwarders to 8.x.

The first solution has a minor downtime but requires more work, the second one requires less work but gives you a minor downtime.
If you use a software distribution tool to upgrade Forwarders, the first is the best, if instead you have to manually upgrade Forwarders, maybe, the second is prefereable.

Ciao.
Giuseppe

Re: Forwarders version compatibility with Indexer version 8.x

btshivanand — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 08:41:44 GMT

Hello Sir,this has helped my platform upgrade.We have Intermediate Forwarders which are universal forwarders.Still we need to consider same approach as you mentioned above.