Splunk Enterprise upgrade: Does Enterprise Security version need compatibility with old and new versions?

[a_kearney]

I am looking to upgrade Splunk Enterprise from 6.6.9 to 8.0.x. I understand this will take at least one intermediary step to Splunk 7.x.

Splunk Enterprise Security 4.7.6 is also installed on the deployment and will require updating to remain compatible. The plan is to end up with SES 6.0.x.

It seems that when upgrading SE the SES version should be compatible with the current version of SE and the version to upgrade to. https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/7.1.0/Installation/AboutupgradingREADTHISFIRST

My problem then comes as I can't find a version of SES that is both compatible with 6.6.x/7.0 and 7.1+, according to the matrix on this page: https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/VersionCompatibility/current/Matrix/CompatMatrix

Am I interpreting the documentation correctly? And if so what possible workarounds could be used?

Thanks

[maraman_splunk · Accepted solution]

Hi

ES app upgrade is done just after Core upgrade in that case, see upgrade ES doc. (so when you launch ES setup, you are on a supported combination)
Please make sure you do backups and are reading all the known issues, especially, you may have some files to clean up from old versions

[skalliger]

Splunk 8 with ES 6.0 is not considered stable yet and I'd not advice to use those versions in production, yet.
You might want to consider upgrading to Splunk Enterprise version 7.3.3 with ES 5.3.1 and go to 8.x and ES 6.x at a later point.

Skalli

[a_kearney]

Thanks.

Do you have a link to where the stable versions are listed so I can keep track?

[skalliger]

Unfortunately not. The stable versions aren't available publicly. 😕

[a_kearney]

Ahh, at least I know why I didn't find them in the docs while researching!

[skalliger]

Just wanted to let you know that ES 6.1.1 is considered stable now with Splunk Enterprise 8.0.3. 🙂