OpenSearch was upgraded to version 3.3.2 in SAS Viya stable 2026.02. When you upgrade your existing SAS Viya environment from an earlier version to stable 2026.02 or later, the platform upgrade might succeed, but the underlying OpenSearch version upgrade to 3.3.2 might fail. 

When the underlying OpenSearch upgrade to version 3.3.2 fails, your sas-opendistro-* pod(s) might display 1/1 "Ready", but the logs contain an error similar to the following:

org.opensearch.bootstrap.StartupException: java.lang.IllegalStateException: The index [[.opendistro_security/...]] was created with version [1.3.6] but the minimum compatible version is [2.0.0]. It should be re-indexed in OpenSearch 2.x before upgrading to 3.3.2

When you try to use solutions or web applications such as SAS^® Visual Investigator and SAS^® Information Catalog that use OpenSearch for search and indexing operations, errors might occur because the solutions or web applications cannot talk to OpenSearch. Here are two example scenarios: 

• Searching in SAS Visual Investigator might return An error occurred during a request to a different service. Please contact your application administrator if the issue persists. Request URL: /svi-sand/paths Status: 500, and your sas-svi-sand log might display a None of the configured OpenSearch servers is reachable error. 
• Searching in SAS Information Catalog might return no results, and your sas-catalog-services log might display a The search server is unresponsive error. 

This issue typically occurs in long-running OpenSearch clusters that have old, leftover OpenSearch version 1.x indices from even before OpenSearch was upgraded to 2.x. 1.x indices are not compatible with OpenSearch 3.x. 2.x indices, however, are compatible with 3.x.

Workaround

Note: If you are upgrading to stable 2026.05 or LTS 2026.03 and later, you do not need to complete this workaround. In those SAS Viya versions, if the SAS Viya OpenSearch Operator detects any incompatible 1.x indices during the upgrade, it blocks the upgrade temporarily with the following message:

Upgrade blocked: the following data indices were created under a version that is incompatible with the target version and must be reindexed or deleted before the upgrade can proceed: <index name> 

You can then re-index such indices at 2.x and retry the upgrade after reindexing. See Internal OpenSearch Requirements for more information.

To circumvent this issue, remove and redeploy the OpenSearch cluster and its Persistent Volume Claim (PVC), which should re-create the entire OpenSearch cluster from scratch at version 3.3.2. Note that this workaround results in the loss of existing indices, but you can recover those indices later via a full reindex of everything after the cluster successfully redeploys.

Complete the following steps:

1. IMPORTANT: Take a full-system backup of the entire environment, including the existing OpenSearch PVs/PVCs before proceeding. See SAS^® Viya^® Platform: Backup and Restore for Viya backup and restore.
2. Remove the OpenSearch cluster by following the Remove an OpenSearch Cluster Resource section of OpenSearch. Ensure that you also delete the OpenSearch PVC. 
3. Redeploy using the same method that you originally used to deploy the environment. See General Process for more information. Completing this step should redeploy the OpenSearch cluster.
4. Restart pods that depend on or communicate with OpenSearch so that their connection to OpenSearch refreshes after the redeploy of the OpenSearch cluster. Here is an example: For SAS Visual Investigator, restart the sas-svi-sand, sas-svi-indexer, and sas-svi-datahub pods. For SAS Information Catalog, restart the sas-catalog-services pod.  
5. Run a full re-index of everything via solutions or web applications that use OpenSearch so that you can recover the OpenSearch indices that you lost due to the deletion of the cluster in Step 2. For example, run a full-reindex of everything from SAS Visual Investigator, and run the rebuild index jobs for all the indices from SAS Information Catalog.