Infrastructure at your Service
By Clemens Bleile From Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) version 19.11. onwards the ORACLE_HOMEs and ORACLE_BASE will be created on ACFS, i.e. take space from an ASM-diskgroup instead of taking filesystem space from /u01. See this blog concerning details. If the ODA has been upgraded from a release < 19.11. to 19.11. or newer, then you usually have diag- and admin-data in 2 ORACLE_BASE-locations: /u01/app/oracle for databases created before migrating to ODA 19.11. or newer and…
Introduction Patch 19.13 is now available on ODA. It’s time to test it. What’s new? This version brings October’s PSU to database and grid homes with their bug fixes, as usual. It also brings 21.4 for DB Systems (21c being an innovation release, understand just for testing). Something new that some of us have been waiting for a while, a multi-user mode for odacli tasks: you don’t need to be root anymore for managing the…
Introduction As virtualization is available for all ODAs now, you could ask yourself if it’s a good idea to use this virtualization or not. Databases can be created as bare metal, but also within a DB System for better isolation. And both can be used on the same ODA. If you’re looking for how to deploy an ODA with KVM virtualization, please have a look at my previous blogpost here. What is a DB System?…
KVM virtualization uses a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) to create a virtualized environment for your Linux applications.In this blog I want to share some tasks I did at a client. The client is using ODA 19.12. The databases are created on the bare metal and for the applications, we decide to create virtual machines. What do I need for a VM creation? -VMstorage for the creation of vdisks -Vdisks will be attached to the VMs…
Introduction Patching an Oracle Database Appliance is sometimes quite tough and you often struggle to solve failures at different steps. Regarding ILOM and BIOS patching errors, a simple workaround is possible. Errors when patching ILOM and/or BIOS This is something I recently had on an ODA X7-2S when trying to apply patch 19.11. Patching of the test server was OK, but patching the production server on a week-end was not OK. I needed to find…
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,…
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…
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…
