The steps were documented in our SSC's User Guide, example here.

The upgrade steps are generally the same across versions, but do go into the specific SSC version's user guide to check in case there are some minor details to take care of. It's also important to check the hardware and software pre-requisites too.

In the same link that I shared earlier, you should be able to see that sometimes we can skip versions. However, the person performing the upgrade must be able to determine if there are other integration points that requires version compatibility to SSC. One example off my head is that if there is WIE integration and WIE does not support skipping version, hence we need to do version by version upgrade for both WIE and SSC.

So we were able to get it upgraded successfully, the database got seeding said successful but the SSC application wouldnt start. After some research we wanted to know if it was related to the Java version. Our server has JRE version 8.

The exact errors were:

FAIL: Application at context path [/ssc] could not be started

FAIL: Encounted exception [org.apache.catalina.lifecycleException: Failed to start component [StandardEngine[Catalina].StandardHost [localhost].Stanardcontext [/ssc]

Fortify SSC 21.1.x requires a minimum of JDK 11 - www.microfocus.com/.../index.htm

I tried JDK 11.0.12 and had the same issue. The documentation didn't mention any configuration updates for Java

ebell, is there anything additional I need to configure? A simple uninstall of Java 8 and install of JDK 11 does nothing. Is there a file that needs to reflect these changes?

My recommendation would be to open a case with support so they can review the logs for both SSC and Tomcat to better understand what is happening. You can open a case with support online at https://support.microfocus.com