Infrastructure at your Service
Introduction Beginning with Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) 19.11. the ORACLE_BASE and ORACLE_HOMEs are created on ACFS. That’s good news, because there is much more space on ASM than on the internal disks, i.e. no space issues with /u01 anymore. So how does it work? ORACLE_BASE and ORACLE_HOME on ACFS When installing an ODA from scratch then ORACLE_BASE and ORACLE_HOME are already on ACFS. See an example of a freshly installed ODA X8-2M: [[email protected] ~]# odacli…
Introduction Until now, High-Availability (HA) ODAs could have been deployed either in bare metal or in virtualized mode. Virtualized mode means that instead of installing a classic Linux system on the nodes, an OVM hypervisor (based on Xen) was deployed. This hypervisor had at least one VM, a special one called ODA BASE, holding all the databases and having direct path to ASM disks. Other VMs could be created, not for databases but for applications,…
You might know that since ODA 19.10, the ODA metadata database is now stored in a MySQL database and not in the apache derby database any more. During a patching to 19.10 or 19.11 from a release earlier than 19.10, the apache derby database will be migrated to a mysql database. This is performed during the odacli update-dcscomponent command. Starting 19.10, DCS Agent will then use MySQL server to display any metadata information, as for…
During all my ODA projects where I need to perform patching operation, I’m using odabr tool. This tool is really easy to use and well designed. It offers the possibility to create snapshot on the /, /u01 and /opt LVM file systems as well as a physical copy (rsync) of the files to an external destination storage as NFS. This is powerful in case you would like to get just one file back. The tool,…
Introduction Building an Oracle infrastructure today without thinking about a Disaster Recovery solution (DR) is quite rare. This became obvious that a backup or a dump will not help if you do not know where to restore or import once your production server is down. And restoring a backup is definitely not the fastest way to bring back your database to life. As a consequence, Data Guard or Dbvisit Standby, depending on which edition you’re…
TL;DR If hardware stays inside your data center, it’s ok to secure erase storage devices. If it leaves your data center (decommission, move to another location), it’s best to physically destroy (shredder) it. Storage devices are not only hard drives, solid state drives, but also the ones holding data temporarily like memory modules (RAM) and CPUs (containing caches, register, …). As a consequence, do not sell used storage devices. Main reason to follow this advice…
Introduction Starting from version 19.11 of the Oracle Database Appliance software bundle, OLVM will definitely replace OVM server as virtualization engine. This change has quite a big impact as there will be no more virtualized specific deployment. Bare metal will come as a standard for all ODAs, and creating VMs for applications, or even databases, will be possible on top of that, for sure if you need them. And you can decide later to use…
Introduction Modern Oracle Database Appliances still support 11gR2, but there are several drawbacks using this old version: if you want/need support for your databases, you should pay for Market Driven Support (11gR2 is even no more under extended support – it ended at the end of 2020) some ODA features will not work with 11gR2 (odacli Data Guard feature for example) the use of ACFS filesystems is mandatory As I already told you, it’s more…
Introduction 4 months after the 19.9, here comes the 19.10 version of the Oracle Database Appliance patch. Let’s have a look at what’s new. Will my ODA supports this 19.10 patch? The 19.10 release will be the same for all ODAs, as usual. The oldest ODA compatible with this release is the X5-2. Don’t expect to install this version on older models. X4-2 is stuck to 18.8, X3-2 is stuck to 18.5 and V1 is…
Introduction Oracle Database Appliance has quite a lot of nice features, but when looking into the documentation, at least one thing is missing. How to configure multiple listeners? Odacli apparently doesn’t know what’s a listener. Let’s find out how to add new ones. odacli Everything should be done using odacli on ODA, but unfortunately odacli has no commands for configuring listeners: odacli -h | grep listener nothing! The wrong way to configure a listener One…
