5 Rapid Home Provisioning

Rapid Home Provisioning is a method of deploying software homes to nodes in a cloud computing environment from a single cluster where you create, store, and manage templates of Oracle homes as images (called gold images) of Oracle software, such as databases, middleware, and applications. You can make a working copy of any gold image, and then you can provision that working copy to any node in the cloud.

You store the gold images in a repository located on a Rapid Home Provisioning Server, which runs on one server in the Rapid Home Provisioning Server cluster that is a highly available provisioning system. This provisioning method simplifies quick patching of Oracle homes, thereby minimizing or completely eliminating downtime.

Also, using Rapid Home Provisioning, you can provision Oracle Database software for the various versions of the Oracle Database releases, such as 10.2.0.5 (Oracle Database 10g), 11.2.0.x (Oracle Database 11g), 12.1.0.1, and 12.1.0.2 (Oracle Database 12c). When you provision such software, Rapid Home Provisioning offers additional features for creating various types of databases (such as Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), single instance, and Oracle Real Application Clusters One Node (Oracle RAC One Node) databases) on different types of storage, and other options, such as using templates and creating container databases (CDBs). Rapid Home Provisioning improves and makes more efficient patching of database software, allowing for rapid and remote patching of the software, in most cases, without any downtime for the database.