Embodiments provide techniques for concurrently upgrading one or more software applications hosted by one or multiple hosts. Checkpoint data associated with the upgrade processes executing on the multiple hosts may be generated during the upgrade. The checkpoint data may be stored in a shared storage that can be accessed by the upgrade processes. Each upgrade process running on a host may be adapted to read checkpoint data from the shared storage and write checkpoint data only to a dedicated location on the shared storage. Checkpoint data written by a first upgrade process may be read by a second upgrade process to determine the status and/or progress of the first upgrade process on a given host. In this manner, the checkpoint data enable the multiple upgrade processes to synchronize with each other.