On Premise Upgrade from 24.1.1 to 24.2

General
1

We have an on premise 24.1.1 setup with VM based deployment.
There is no Kafka datasets being used in our application.

From the release notes, we understand , that VM based deployments in 24.2 are deprecated but not removed yet.
Considering this , can we update to 24.2 in an windows setup using the update.bat script and keep the rest of our setup AS-IS.

I understand from 24.2 release notes Kafka, Casandra and ElasticSearch are externalized and Pega recommends setting them up externally.
Client infra team does not have expertise / knowledge in setting this up externally. Moreover Pega would not be their in the future technology landscape.

Hence an attempt to upgrade to v24.2 from v24.1.1 without these services externalized and in a VM setup would result in a failure OR is it feasible to let the application be alive like this?

Note :- Upgrade to 24.2 is done only to mitigate certain vulnerabilities.

2

Pega 24.2 still supports VM-based deployment, but it is deprecated and 24.2 is the last supported VM release. However, Kafka, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch are no longer embedded in 24.2 and must be externalized for supported operation.

If your application truly does not depend on those services, a VM-based 24.2 upgrade may still be feasible as a ‘temporary’ vulnerability-mitigation step, but it is not a safe “AS-IS” assumption. If any of those services are required by the platform or app features in use, the upgrade should be considered unsupported or likely to fail without externalized services.