Documentation forSecurity Event Manager

Best practices for SEM upgrades

As of version SEM 6.7, L4 configuration is no longer supported.

The upgrade overwrites the system partition and cannot be interrupted or undone. SolarWinds recommends exporting (Hyper-V) or taking a snapshot of (vSphere) your SEM virtual appliance before you perform the upgrade. You can delete the snapshot when the upgrade is completed.

Resize the SEM virtual appliance

You can increase the SEM virtual appliance capacity by increasing the SEM virtual appliance size in your hypervisor. This process adds up to 15 minutes to the boot-up process to adjust the file systems.

See your hypervisor documentation for information about increasing the appliance size.

During the boot-up process, do not turn off or reboot the appliance until the startup is completed. Subsequent bootups and reboots do not require an additional amount of time.

To retain your log data for an extended amount of time, you may need to increase the SEM virtual appliance size. You can increase your SEM virtual appliance capacity by increasing the hard disk size in your VMWare vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V client.

Always shut down the SEM virtual appliance before you reconfigure the vSphere or Hyper-V client disk.

When you increase the size of your virtual appliance, use the following guidelines:

  • You can exceed the 2 TB limit with a fresh SEM deployment.
  • After you increase the virtual disk size, you cannot decrease its size using the same methods.
  • If you have VM snapshots, you cannot increase the size of your virtual appliance.

Additional considerations for VMware vSphere

If you are running VMware vSphere and do not have snapshots, you can edit the VM settings and change the disk size. During startup, the virtual appliance recognizes the change in disk size and partitions and adjusts the file systems appropriately. If snapshots are available, the disk size field is disabled.

If you need to increase the size of your virtual appliance, delete all VM snapshots or increase the existing VM by cloning it onto a larger disk. See your vSphere documentation for more information about performing these tasks.