Upgrade the SMC Appliance

Use an upgrade patch to upgrade the SMC Appliance from a previous version to version 7.3.0.

There are two kinds of SMC Appliance patches:

  1. Hotfix patches include bug fixes and other improvements for the current SMC Appliance version. In addition, P patches also include binaries for the standalone client. Once the patch is activated, these binaries become available through the SMC Downloads.

    Hotfix patch files use the letter P as a separator between the version number and the patch number.

    Example: 7.3.1P001

  2. Upgrade patches upgrade the SMC Appliance to a new version.

    Upgrade patch files use the letter U as a separator between the version number and the patch number.

    Example: 7.3.1U001

We recommend checking the availability of SMC Appliance patches regularly, and installing the patches when they become available. For detailed information about installing SMC Appliance patches, see the Forcepoint Network Security Platform Installation Guide.

  • SMC 7.3 requires an updated license.
    • If the automatic license update function is in use, the license is updated automatically.
    • If the automatic license update function is not in use, request a license upgrade on our website at https://⁠stonesoftlicenses.forcepoint.com. Activate the new license using the SMC Client before upgrading the software.
  • The SMC Appliance must be upgraded before the Security Engines are upgraded to the same major version.
  • You can upgrade from the following SMC versions; however, only the latest maintenance release and LTS versions are tested. Hence, It is recommended to upgrade to the latest LTS release of SMC, regardless of Engine versions being managed. For detailed information on how to upgrade SMC Appliance to a new version, see Forcepoint Network Security Platform Installation Guide.
    • 6.10.13 - 6.10.17
    • 7.1.1 - 7.1.7
    • 7.2.1 - 7.2.4

    For detailed information on how to upgrade the SMC Appliance from a version that is not listed above to a newer version, see Knowledge Base article 41318 .

You can upgrade the SMC Appliance using the SMC Client or using the appliance maintenance and bug remediation (AMBR) patching utility on the command line of the SMC Appliance. For detailed information, see Forcepoint Network Security Platform Product Guide.

Deprecated features

Before upgrading, please consider these feature deprecations.

Table 1.
Feature Description
Legacy IPsec VPN algorithms removed Support for legacy and insecure IPsec VPN algorithms has been removed. This includes the removal of support for DES and Blowfish ciphers, the MD5 message digest algorithm, and Diffie-Hellman groups 1 (768 bit) and 2 (1024 bit).
Legacy Web Portal UI service removed Support for the legacy and insecure Web Portal UI service has been removed. It has been replaced with a re-implemented service using the SMC API, offering similar basic read-only admin access.