MiniCluster: Known issues and Best Practices for Upgrades (Doc ID 2796645.1)

Last updated on APRIL 06, 2022

Applies to:

Purpose

 Upgrades can fail in several ways. This KA note attempts to document the known issues and provide best practice suggestions for this task and is intended to be consumed prior to beginning an upgrade.

Scope

Customers frequently ask how to upgrade their systems from one release to another, and usually they are going from some very old release to the latest. Particularly there have been a number of problems customer's run into when upgrading from MC versions earlier than 1.3.0. In such cases performing an upgrade may take a number of hours and several 'upgrade' hops, and performing a factory reset may be the fastest option. For details on how to perform a Factory reset see Oracle MiniCluster S7-2: How to factory reset the entire system (Doc ID 2151620.1).

Some of the problems that can arise during upgrade include...

• DNS or NTP lookup issues
• Incorrect host name to IP address mappings
• Incorrect process followed, e.g. upgrading things manually rather than allowing MCMU to do the job
• State of the system prior to the operation being performed, e.g. hardware or full file system issues
• ASM free space for DB and RAC upgrades
• Too many files in DB and / or RAC GRID homes
• Unexpected local user customizations in any solaris host within the system: e.g. control domains, application and database VM's, or the kernel zone HA/NFS/ACFS Grid.
• System critical user account passwords expired, forgotten, out of sync with MCMU and/or changed manually outside of MCMU CLI or BUI interfaces

Note on MiniCluster Kernel Zone Grid

The MiniCluster Kernel Zone HA/NFS/ACFS/ASM Grid is a High Availability ASM/ACFS file system instance that provides shared storage to the rest of the node of the cluster, including global zones and application and database nodes. The shares are sourced out of a two node cluster based on Solaris Kernel Zone implementation. All of the shares and cluster resources are managed by Oracle Cluster CRS and sourced out of an Oracle Cluster ASM instance in the Kernal Zone Grid. Each MiniCluster node has one Kernel zone that is part of this cluster which will be called 'acfskz' in the 'zoneadm list' output.

For more details on the architecture of the MiniCluster S7-2 please refer to the system documentation found on docs.oracle.com.

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