Infrastructure at your Service
Introduction One of the key features of the ODA (Oracle Database Appliance) is the ability to patch the entire stack every three months, the goal being to keep all the components up-to-date. Most of the customers won’t patch so often, but one patch a year is quite a good average. But when comes the time for patching, comes the time for anxiety for the DBA. And it’s totally justified. Why ODA patching can eventually be…
Introduction Reimaging an ODA is a good practice for a lot of reasons. To make your ODA cleaner if it’s running for many years and if you patch regularly. To simplify patching because if you’re late you could have to apply multiple intermediate patches to reach the target version. Or simply because you need to change the configuration (for example network configuration) and you want to make things clean, and be sure that future patches…
Even you don’t need 18c, or you’re not ready for this release, this patch will also update your 11gR2, 12cR1 and 12cR2 databases to the latest PSU available on ODA, it means for example the patchset from last July if you’re using 12cR1. Here is how to apply this latest patch for your ODA lite. In this example, the patch was applied on an X6-2S ODA running on previous release: 12.2.1.4.0. 1) Download the patch…
Introduction When you work on ODA you sometimes get struggled with local filesystem free space. ODA has terabytes of space on data disks, but local disks are still limited to a raid-1 array of 2x 480GB disks. And only few GB are dedicated to / and /u01 filesystems. You do not need hundreds of GB on these filesystems, but I think that you prefer to keep at least 20-30% of free space. And if you…
Introduction It has been 5 years I’m working on ODA and I now have a quite good overview of the pros and the cons of such a solution. On one hand, ODA can greatly streamline your Oracle Database environment if you understand the purpose of this appliance. On the other hand, ODA can be your nightmare if you’re not using it as it supposed to be used. Let’s discover the common mistakes to avoid from…
Introduction X3-2 and X4-2 ODAs are still very capable pieces of hardware in 2018. With 256GB of RAM and at least 16 cores per node, and with 18TB RAW disk capacity as a standard these appliances are far from obsolete even you probably don’t have any more support on the hardware from Oracle. If you own several ODAs of this kind, hardware support may not really be a problem. If something fails, you can use…
Facing an internal inconsistency in the ODA derby database is very painful (see https://blog.dbi-services.com/oda-lite-what-is-this-odacli-repository/ for more info about the derby database). I have recently faced a case where the database deletion was failing and the database remained then in “Deleting” status. Connecting directly to the internal derby database and doing some self cleaning is very risky and should be performed at your own and known risk. So, in most of the case, a database inconsistency issue…
Here is how to apply the latest patch for your ODA. As usual the Oracle documentation is not 100% accurate. I applied this patch on 2 ODAs X7-2M previously deployed in 12.2.1.2.0, no intermediate patch was needed. 1) Download the patch The patch number is 28216794. This patch will update the following components: dcs (odacli), operating system, bios/firmwares, ilom, GI, dbhomes and databases. Download and copy the patch to a temporary folder on the server,…
Deploying new Bare Metal ODA X7-2S or 2M, I have been curious how configure-firstnet would interact with the fiber and copper ethernet network interfaces. Reading documentation on the web, I could not clearly understand if it is mandatory to have the ODA connected to the LAN when performing an ODA reimage and/or running the configure-firstnet in additionnal of having ILOM connection. After digging deeper and few tests, I wanted to share my experience in this…
Configuring fiber interfaces during an ODA installation can sometime been challenging. The configuration can depend on the kind of gigabit interface converter (GBIC) and switch been used. In this blog, I would like to show a real case faced during one of our customer deployment, and come with a solution.
