11.1 Understanding Out-of-Place and Rolling Upgrades
You can use rolling upgrade or out-of-place upgrades to upgrade your Oracle Grid Infrastructure software.
If you have an existing Oracle Grid Infrastructure installation, then you upgrade your existing cluster by performing an out-of-place upgrade. An in-place upgrade of Oracle Grid Infrastructure is not supported. All upgrades are out-of-place upgrades, meaning that the software binaries are placed in a different Grid home from the Grid home used for the prior release. You can also perform the upgrade in a rolling manner, which means there is always at least one cluster node operational during the upgrade.
Rolling Upgrades
You can upgrade Oracle Grid Infrastructure by upgrading individual nodes without stopping Oracle Grid Infrastructure on other nodes in the cluster, which is called performing a rolling upgrade. Rolling upgrades avoid downtime and ensure continuous availability while the software is upgraded to a new release.
Note:
In contrast with releases prior to Oracle Clusterware 11g Release 2, Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) always performs rolling upgrades, even if you select all nodes for the upgrade.Out-of-Place Upgrades
During an out-of-place upgrade, the installer installs the newer release in a separate Grid home. Both the old and new releases of Oracle Grid Infrastructure exist on each cluster member node, but only one release is active. By contrast, an in-place upgrade overwrites the software in the current Oracle Grid Infrastructure home.
To perform an out-of-place upgrade, you must create new Oracle Grid Infrastructure homes on each node. Then you can perform an out-of-place rolling upgrade, so that some nodes run Oracle Grid Infrastructure from the original Grid home, and other nodes run Oracle Grid Infrastructure from the new Grid home.
Related Topics
Parent topic: Upgrading Oracle Grid Infrastructure