You can upgrade from vRealize Log Insight 4.8 on an SLES operating system to vRealize Log Insight 8.0 on a Photon operating system.

Upgrading from an SLES-based vRealize Log Insight 4.8 to a Photon-based vRealize Log Insight 8.0 is different from the previous upgrades because of the change in the underlying operating system. This upgrade changes the architecture of each virtual machine in the vRealize Log Insight virtual appliance.

For example, consider a virtual machine with a disk SDA, which has three partitions for boot (SDA1), swap (SDA2), and root (SDA3). The size of partition SDA3 is approximately 16 GB and it contains information about SLES. Upgrading from an SLES-based vRealize Log Insight 4.8 to a Photon-based vRealize Log Insight 8.0 creates another partition in SDA3 and splits it equally into two parts, sized approximately 8 GB each - one for SLES (SDA3) and another for Photon (SDA4). SDA4 becomes the active partition. SDA3 remains inactive but contains valid vRealize Log Insight information for SLES. You can boot SDA3 by manually selecting it when you boot the virtual machine.

Note:

Before upgrading from an SLES-based vRealize Log Insight 4.8 to a Photon-based vRealize Log Insight 8.0, ensure that the root partition has enough space for the upgrade. If the root partition is smaller in size, for example, 8 GB, increase the disk size to 20 GB, so that the root partition size increases to 16 GB. You must increase the disk size for each node that has a root partition with less space. For information about increasing the root partition size, see https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/76304.

After an upgrade to a Photon-based vRealize Log Insight 8.0:

  • There is no change in the user interface or REST API.
  • When you connect to the vRealize Log Insight 8.0 virtual machine from the command line and work on it, you see systemd-based information, because SLES is based on initd whereas Photon is based on systemd.

For additional information about upgrading to vRealize Log Insight 8.0, see the upgrade notes.

For information about the upgrade process, see Upgrade to the Latest Version of vRealize Log Insight.