Infrastructure at your Service
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…
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…
Introduction ODA started to become popular with X3-2 and X4-2 in 2013/2014. These 2 ODAs were very similar. The X5-2 from 2015 was different with 3.5 inches disks instead of 2.5 inches and additional SSDs for small databases (FLASH diskgroup). All these 3 ODAs were running 11gR2 and 12cR1 databases and were managed by the oakcli binary. If you’re still using these old machines, you should know that there is a lot of differences compared…
