About Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning

Oracle FPP is a one-stop solution for all your patching and upgrade needs for Oracle Databases, including single-instance Oracle Database, Oracle RAC, and Data Guard configurations.

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning (Oracle FPP) performs Out-Of-Place Gold Image-based patching, keeping in-line with the Best Practices Recommendations from the Maximum Availability Architecture team of Oracle. Oracle FPP supports standardization, rollback after failure or success, and revert and resume after failures.

Oracle FPP supports two deployment models, in the simplest, quickest, and most intuitive way:

1. The simple-to-use and no-setup needed Oracle FPP Lite, which is ready to be out-of-the-box for patching all configurations and deployments of Oracle Databases and Oracle Grid Infrastructure.
2. The central Oracle FPP Server, which can serve a fleet of databases and Grid Infrastructure from a single central server, making it easy to patch thousands of databases simultaneously. You can deploy a single Oracle FPP server for a given data center and use it to patch your entire fleet in that data center.

Continue to read further for more details on how to use Oracle FPP Lite and the Oracle FPP Server.

• As a local server (Oracle FPP Lite), that is the default configuration when you install Oracle Grid Infrastructure. Oracle FPP Lite operation enables you to perform Oracle Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Database patching operations on the local cluster in a simplified environment without having to register or deploy gold images. Deploy either the Oracle Grid Infrastructure or the Oracle Database patched home and run the patch operation using either the rhpctl move gihome or rhpctl move database command, specifying the source and destination paths instead of working copy names.

• As a central server (Oracle FPP Server), that stores and manages standardized images, called gold images. You can deploy gold images to any number of nodes across a data center. You can use the deployed homes to create new clusters and databases, and patch, upgrade, and scale existing installations.

  The server manages software homes on the cluster hosting the Oracle FPP Server, itself, Oracle FPP Clients, and can also manage Oracle Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Database installations running 11g release 2 (11.2.0.4) and later releases. The server can also manage rhpclient-less targets, which do not have Oracle Clusterware installed. Refer to My Oracle Support note 551141.1 for more information about Oracle Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Database upgrade paths.

  An Oracle FPP Server can provision new installations and can manage existing installations without any changes to the existing installations (such as no agent, daemon, or configuration prerequisites). Oracle FPP Servers also include capabilities for automatically sharing gold images among peer Oracle FPP Servers to support enterprises with geographically distributed data centers.

Note:

• Oracle does not support Oracle FPP on HP-UX and Windows operating systems.
• The Oracle FPP Server does not manage operating system images on generic servers.
• Combined Oracle FPP patching for Oracle Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Database is not supported for standalone configurations.
• Oracle FPP enables you to manage and patch the whole Oracle software stack on Oracle Exadata, including Oracle Grid Infrastructure, Oracle Database, RoCE/IB switches, Cell Storage Servers, and compute nodes.

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Advantages

Deploying Oracle software using Oracle FPP has the following advantages:

• Ensures standardization and enables high degrees of automation with gold images and managed lineage of deployed software.

• Minimizes downtime by deploying new homes as images (working copies of gold images) out-of-place rolling patching, without disrupting active databases or clusters.

• Simplifies local maintenance operations using Oracle FPP Lite with a consistent API across database versions and deployment models.

• Provides REST API interface for Oracle FPP operations to ensure flexibility when integrating with bespoke and third-party orchestration engines.

• Reduces maintenance risk with built-in validations and a dry run mode to test the operations.

• Enables you to resume or restart the commands in the event of an unforeseen issue, reducing the impact of maintenance operations.

• Schedules and submits operations at a scheduled time instead of running the command immediately. The job scheduler performs the job and stores the metadata for the job, along with the current job status.

• Minimizes and often eliminates the impact of patching and upgrades, with features that include:

  • Options to do rolling patching to ensure continuous availability of the services.
  • Adaptive management of database sessions and OJVM during rolling patching.
  • Options for management of consolidated deployments.

• The deployment and maintenance operations enable customizations to include environment-specific actions into the automated workflow.