About Managing Patches for Instances Provisioned With Earlier Releases

The following types of patches apply to your Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace instances:

SOA Bundle Patches

Note:

Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace 23.2.2 and later versions support SOA Stack Patch Bundles (SPBs).
Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace 23.1.1 or earlier versions do not support SOA Stack Patch Bundles (SPBs). Use the SOA bundle patch instead of the SOA SPB to patch your existing Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace instances.

When you provision a new Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace instance, it contains all of the latest patches associated with the product. However, once instances are created, they are not automatically updated with the latest bundle patches from subsequent releases. You are responsible for keeping the instance patch levels current.

To retrieve a list of bundle patches that have been applied to your Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace instance:

Use the ssh command to connect to the Administration Server VM (as the opc user):
```
ssh -i private_key opc@AdminServerVM_IP_address
```
Change to the oracle user:
```
sudo su - oracle
```
Enter the following command based on your Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace instance version.
- For Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace instances created on 23.2.2 and later versions:
```
/u01/app/oracle/middleware/OPatch/opatch lsinventory
```
- For Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace instances created on 23.1.1 or earlier versions:
```
/u01/app/oracle/suite/OPatch/opatch lsinventory
```

Applying bundle patches to existing instances may involve multiple Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace instances that were provisioned at different times that may include different bundle patches. Contact Oracle Support for information about the latest Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace certified patches and instructions on how to apply the patches.

If a FUSER could not be located error occurs while applying a patch to Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace, perform the following steps:

Set the environment variable: export OPATCH_NO_FUSER=TRUE.
In the Unix shell where step 1 is executed or OPATCH_NO_FUSER=TRUE is set, apply the patch.

Note:

You can find the current list of Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace bundle patches in Patches Installed By Release.

Quarterly Security Patches

Oracle recommends that you subscribe to security updates and apply quarterly security patches that are available for your release. For more information, see Step1: Apply the Latest Patch Set Update for WebLogic Server.

Operating System Patches

To assist you with managing operating system patches, Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace supports the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OS Management service. OS Management offers the capability to view and install the available CPU fixes, security patches, and bug fixes on your compute instances. You can create instance groups and add all the nodes of a SOA cluster to a group and manage all the patches and updates of all the instances in the group. To enable OS Management for Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace, see Enable OS Management for Oracle SOA Suite on Marketplace Instances.

Recommendations:

Before applying an operating system patch, stop the SOA servers from the command line. After the patch is applied, start the SOA servers.
For major version patching (for example, OEL6 to OEL8), consult the Linux upgrade documentation if your operating system version has a supported upgrade path. While it is possible to upgrade the Linux version of current nodes to OEL8, the base image continues to remain on OEL7, and any subsequent scale-out operations creates a new node on OEL7 with potential issues.
Always test the patch on a non-production environment before applying it to a production environment.
If you need help with issues in applying Linux patches, file a service request (SR) at My Oracle Support (click the Service Requests tab, and click Create Technical SR) on the Oracle Linux product.