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Exadata Storage Cell Patching - Manual Rolling Update Procedure (Doc ID 1472199.1)

Last updated on JANUARY 17, 2020

Applies to:

Oracle Exadata Hardware - Version 11.2.0.2 and later
Linux x86-64

Goal

Manual rolling updates involves dropping all grid disks from a cell and re-adding them after the cell is patched successfully.

This document will described requirements and highlevel steps followed by an example of this procedure.

 

Note: Using the 'manual rolling update procedure' means the entire contents of the cell will need to be re-balanced by ASM twice, once when the cell is removed and second time when the cell is added back. These are extremely expensive operations. Carefully consider the impact on your deployment before deciding to use 'manual rolling update procedure'. Also note that every cell patch will require a ASM re-balance, so if you have large number of cells in your deployment, the patch time will be lengthy. Additionaly, in order for this procedure to work you must have enough spare capacity in each of the ASM disk groups to allow re-balance of all the data stored in all the grid disks on the most full cell in the environment. The auto-online functionality used by the patchmgr for rolling updates, does not remove whole cells from disk groups during patching, and therefore usually will not require heavy data movement by ASM. For these reasons the steps outlines in this document are not recommended as best practice.

The high level steps in the procedure are:

  1. Drop all the grid disks from the disk group on a cell to be patched forcing a re-balance.
  2. Wait for the re-balance to complete.
  3. Patch the cell using patchmgr using non-rolling method.
  4. Once the cell is successfully patched and booted up, add the grid disks back to the diskgroup forcing one more re-balance.
  5. Wait for the re-balance to complete.
  6. Repeat the steps 1-5 for the next cell till all the cells are patched.

The details for the procedure below :

Solution

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