Following are highlights to pay attention to when upgrading to a higher ALM Octane version.

Refer to Linux Upgrade Guide or Windows Upgrade Guide for the full upgrade process.

General notes

Category Description
General Make sure to have viable accessible backups of your relational database (either Oracle or SQL Server), Elasticsearch and the repository folder on your file system. For details, see Best practices for backing up ALM Octane data.
Cluster Make sure to stop services for all cluster nodes before upgrading.

Upgrading to 16.0.400

Category Description
Upgrade path

The current release is a service pack, meaning that you can only upgrade to 16.0.400 from 16.0.300. If you have not yet upgraded to ALM Octane 16.0.300, upgrade now.

HTTP/2

ALM Octane now supports the HTTP/2 protocol. For details, refer to the post-upgrade section in Linux Upgrade Guide or Windows Upgrade Guide.

Upgrading to 16.0.300

Category Description
Upgrade path

The current release is a service pack, meaning that you can only upgrade to 16.0.300 from 16.0.200. If you have not yet upgraded to ALM Octane 16.0.200, upgrade now.

Elasticsearch version

As we communicated earlier (see https://portal.microfocus.com/s/article/KM000003192), we recommend using Elasticsearch version 7.16.2 to prevent a potential log4j security breach in the Elasticsearch server.
Known issue

When upgrading to ALM Octane 16.0.300 in Oracle environments, if you have a space with more than 500 workspaces, you may encounter an error message regarding the FixVulnerabilitiesCountOfWIUpgrader Data upgrader. This is a known issue.

For a workaround, see “Troubleshooting a Data upgrader failure” in the ALM Octane 16.0.300 Upgrade Guide.

Upgrading to 16.0.200

Category Description
Upgrade path

The current release is a service pack, meaning that you can only upgrade to 16.0.200 from 16.0.100. If you have not yet upgraded to ALM Octane 16.0.100, upgrade now.

Upgrading to 16.0.100

Category Description
Java version ALM Octane 16.0.100 requires JDK 11. You must install JDK 11 before upgrading ALM Octane.
Elasticsearch version

ALM Octane 16.0.100 requires Elasticsearch version 7.16.2. If you are using an earlier version of Elasticsearch, you must upgrade to 7.16.2.

Note that you cannot upgrade to ALM Octane 16.0.100 if you still have indexes created in Elasticsearch 5.x which have not yet been re-indexed (as described in previous upgrade guides). To verify that all your spaces are up-to-date, open Settings > Site > Spaces. The ELS Maintenance Status of all your spaces should be Done.
Supported upgrade path

The current release is a long term path release (LTP), meaning that you can upgrade to ALM Octane 16.0.100 either directly from 15.1.20, or from 15.1.90.
LTP upgrade

If you are upgrading from 15.1.20 (previous LTP release), there are various pre-upgrade and post-upgrade steps required, as described in the upgrade guide.

Caution: To roll back the LTP upgrade, you will need your pre-upgrade configuration files from each node. Make sure you save a copy of the configuration files in a secure location before upgrading. You cannot roll back without these files.

This includes octane.conf, and any other configuration files in /opt/octane/conf.

For details on what was added in each of the service packs since the previous LTP release, see: