What would be safest way to upgrade deployment server without losing any data?

[sahabhi606]

Dear All,

We have Deployment Server with around 1900+ clients reporting to it. Currently it is v7.0 and we are planning to upgrade it v7.3.3.

The document says, disable deployment server and then upgrade, but if I disable it what would be the behavior of clients? What would be safest way to upgrade deployment server without losing any data.

Also, will Deployment Server (v7.3.3) work well with Indexer Cluster (v7.0) ? will I can potentially face any compatibility issues?

Regards,
Abhi

[nickhills · Accepted solution]

There is no issue with taking a deployment server offline, deployment clients will not take any negative action and will silently fail to check for updates - no problem whatsoever.

Perform an upgrade as you normally would, which stops the DS, and then restarts it afterwards. Then your DS clients will re register and carry on as normal.

One thing to mention is that 1900 clients is a LOT!
Splunk recommends max 500 clients per DS. Although I have worked on deployments with similar (higher) numbers to yours, but we reduced the client poll to 30 minutes (phoneHomeIntervalInSecs)
https://answers.splunk.com/answers/26620/how-many-clients-can-one-deployment-server-manage.html
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.0.1/Admin/Deploymentclientconf

Compatibility is ok, no problems with using a DS at a higher version than your DS client.

[epari1437]

@nickhills , We are planning to upgrade our DS to splunk 9.0 however our splunk hf, indexer and sh are having splunk 8.1.2. In case of app deployment, we can do it from higher version of DS to lower version but my concern is as we are also monitoring Deployment server performance data (cpu, memory usage etc) in SH so will that impact the data flow from  if we only upgrade our DS higher than indexer, SH? 

[nickhills]

If your metrics are coming from the nix or windows TA then changing the DS version would not have any effect as it is the TA providing that data not the Splunk version. 

With that said, so far, my limited testing of v9 I haven’t seen any differences in any of the internal metrics either, so you *should* be ok. 

if you need anything further you are better off starting a new topic so more people will see your question!