Preparing for upgrade in a stand-alone environment

The upgrade patch promotes your Guardium® system to the next major version. Use the following workflow to prepare your stand-alone system for upgrade.

1. Ensure that you meet the minimum system requirements. For more information, see Software Appliance Technical Requirements for Guardium 11.5
2. Plan your upgrade strategy. For more information, see Planning an upgrade.
3. Identify your upgrade path and download the relevant patches from the IBM Fix Central website. For more information, see Identifying the correct upgrade path.
   • The latest applicable health check patch.
   • The latest upgrade patch or GPU.
   • All applicable maintenance patches, such as the latest bundle, security fix, and sniffer patch. To view the list of available patches, access the home page of the Guardium UI and click the bell icon.
   • Base and append licenses.
4. Upgrade your firmware to the most recent version provided by your vendor. If you use a Guardium appliance, check the Fix Central website for the latest firmware.
5. If you want to use an external storage system for your archive and backup, ensure that you have the configuration details ready. For more information, see Configuring external storage.
6. Unmount all media such as DVDs or USB disks that are mounted either directly or virtually on the physical appliance. Mounted media might cause the upgrade to fail.
7. Schedule the installation during a quiet time on your Guardium system to avoid conflicts with other long-running processes such as heavy reports, audit processes, backups, and imports.
8. Set the time to the local time zone and synchronize time across all your Guardium systems and agents by using a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server.