About Oracle Exadata Infrastructure Patching

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning (Oracle FPP) supports rolling patching of Oracle Exadata infrastructure, including storage cells, network switches, and database nodes.

Patching Oracle Exadata infrastructure involves choosing a driving node from which you start the patching operation. A driving node can be either the Oracle FPP Server, or any of the Oracle FPP Client nodes.

Use the -server option to initiate the patching operation from the Oracle FPP Server. For this patch driving mode, the workflow is as follows:

1. Establish passwordless SSH root user equivalence from Oracle FPP Server to the target node.
2. Evaluate the patch operation impact (-eval precheck).
3. Apply the patch using the rhpctl update exadata command.

Use the -client client_node_name option to initiate the patching operation from the Oracle FPP Client. For this patch driving mode, the workflow is as follows:

1. Establish passwordless SSH root user equivalence from Oracle FPP Client to the target node.
2. Deploy the image on the target node using the rhpctl import image command.
3. Evaluate the patch operation impact (-eval precheck).
4. Apply the patch using the rhpctl update exadata command.

If the patch operation fails for any reason, then Oracle FPP enables you to rollback the cell server and database node patches, and downgrade the network switch patches.