1. Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Administrator's Guide
  2. Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning
  3. Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Features

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Features

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning (Oracle FPP) provides various features to ease configuration and management tasks.

  • Patching/software updates to Oracle Databases (Oracle RAC, Oracle RAC One Node, and Single Instance), Oracle Grid Infrastructure, Oracle Restart, and Oracle Exadata Engineered Systems (DBNode, Storage Cells, and Network).
  • Software upgrades to Oracle Databases and Oracle Grid Infrastructure.

    Note:

    Patching is defined as a software revision within a major version, such as from 19.3 to 19.4, whereas Upgrade is defined as a revision of major version, such as from 19c to 23ai.
  • Operating system configuration monitoring. Enables you to keep track of the OS configurations and keep track of changes made to the OS to help in troubleshooting.

The deployment and maintenance operations are extensible, allowing customizations to include environment-specific actions into the automated workflow.

Oracle FPP Deployment Models

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.

FPP Fleet Scale Job Framework

Oracle FPP supports submission of a number of patching operations through the job framework. Each operation is identified by a job associated with a job number. You can monitor, abort, or resume jobs after failures. Parent and child jobs are supported for simplified grouping of similar jobs.

Oracle FPP Tag Framework

Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 23ai, the tag framework offers a way to initiate a large no of operations using a single command through the use of tags associated with Oracle Database or Oracle Grid Infrastructure targets. You can collectively monitor jobs through simplified user interface to minimize and simplify human interactions, and to speed up operations.

Global Fleet Standardization and Management

  • Sharing gold images between peer Oracle FPP Servers: Large enterprises typically host multiple data centers and, within each data center, there may be separate network segments. In the Oracle FPP architecture, one Oracle FPP Server operates on a set of Oracle FPP Clients and rhpclient-less targets within a given data center (or network segment of a data center). Therefore each data center requires at least one Oracle FPP Server.

    While each data center may have some unique requirements in terms of the gold images that destination servers will use, the goal of standardization is using the same gold image across all data centers whenever possible. To that end, Oracle FPP supports peer-to-peer sharing of gold images to easily propagate gold images among multiple Oracle FPP Servers.

  • Gold image drift detection and aggregation: After you provision a software home from a gold image, you may have to apply a patch directly to the deployed home. At this point the deployed home has drifted from the gold image. Oracle FPP provides two capabilities for monitoring and reporting drift:

    • Oracle FPP compares a specific home to its parent gold image and lists any patches that are applied to the home but that are not in the gold image.

    • Oracle FPP compares a specific gold image to all of its descendant homes and lists the aggregation of all patches applied to those homes that are not in the gold image. This provides a build specification for a new gold image that could be applied to all of the descendants of the original gold image, such that no patches will be lost from any of those deployments.

    See Also:

  • Configuration collection and reporting: The Oracle FPP Server can collect and retain operating system configuration and the root file system contents of specified Oracle FPP Clients. If an Oracle FPP Client node is rendered unusable (for example, a user accidentally deletes or changes operating system configuration or the root file system), then it can be difficult to determine the problem and correct it. This feature automates the collection of relevant information, enabling restoration in the event of node failure.

Flexibility and Extensibility

  • RESTful API: Oracle FPP provides a RESTful API for many common operations, including provisioning, patching, upgrading, and query operations.

    See Also:

    Oracle Database REST API Reference

  • Customizable authentication: Host-to-host authentication in certain environments, particularly in compliance-conscious industries, such as financials and e-commerce, often uses technologies and products that are not supported, natively, by Oracle FPP. This feature allows integrating Oracle FPP authentication with the mechanisms in use at your data center.

  • Command scheduler: The ability to schedule and bundle automated tasks is essential for maintenance of a large database estate. Oracle FPP supports scheduling tasks such as provisioning software homes, switching to a new home, and scaling a cluster. Also, you can add a list of clients to a command, facilitating large-scale operations.

  • Configurable connectivity: As security concerns and compliance requirements increase, so do the restrictions on connectivity across the intranets of many enterprises. You can configure the small set ports used for communication between the Oracle FPP Server and its Clients, allowing low-impact integration into firewalled or audit-conscious environments.

Other Oracle FPP Features

  • Oracle Exadata Patching: 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.

  • Vertical Oracle Exadata Patching: Oracle FPP enables you to patch Oracle Exadata compute node and Oracle Grid Infrastructure vertically.

  • External Metadata Repository: You can create an external database for Oracle FPP Server metadata. You can specify an external metadata repository, which can be an Oracle Database, during initial configuration.

  • Provision and manage any software home: Oracle FPP enables you to create a gold image from any software home. You can then provision that software to any Oracle FPP Client or rhpclient-less target as a working copy of a gold image. The software may be any binary that you will run on an Oracle FPP Client or rhpclient-less target.

  • Adaptive Oracle RAC Rolling Patching for OJVM Deployments: In a clustered environment, the default approach for Oracle FPP for patching a database is Oracle RAC rolling patching. However non-rolling may be required if the patched database home contains OJVM patches. In this case, Oracle FPP determines whether rolling patching is possible and does so, if applicable.

    Note:

    Starting with Oracle Database 19c, you can perform OJVM patching in the rolling mode. For earlier database versions, Oracle FPP determines whether rolling patching is possible and performs rolling patching, if possible.

  • Pre-checks evaluation: Before running any command, Oracle FPP checks various preconditions to ensure the command will succeed. However, some conditions cannot be detected prior to a command running. And, while Oracle FPP allows a failed command to be reverted or resumed after an error condition is corrected, it is preferable to address as many potential issues as possible before the command is run. The command evaluation mode will test the preconditions for a given command, without making any changes, and report potential problems and correct them before the command is actually run.

  • Provision, scale, patch, and upgrade Oracle Grid Infrastructure: The Oracle FPP Server can provision Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11g release 2 (11.2.0.4) homes, and later, add or delete nodes from an Oracle Grid Infrastructure configuration, and can also be used to patch and upgrade Oracle Grid Infrastructure homes. In addition, there is a rollback capability that facilitates undoing a failed patch procedure.

  • Provision, scale, patch, and upgrade Oracle Database: You can use Oracle FPP to provision, scale, and patch Oracle Database 11g release 2 (11.2.0.4), and later releases. Refer My Oracle Support note 551141.1 for more information about Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Database upgrade paths.

    When you provision such software, Oracle FPP offers additional features for creating various types of databases (such as 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). The Oracle FPP Server can add nodes to an Oracle RAC configuration, and remove nodes from an Oracle RAC configuration. Oracle FPP also 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.

  • Support for single-instance databases: You can use Oracle FPP to provision, patch, and upgrade single-instance databases running on clusters or Oracle Restart, or on single, standalone nodes.

  • Combined Oracle Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Database patching: When you patch an Oracle Grid Infrastructure deployment, Oracle FPP enables you to simultaneously patch the Oracle Database homes on the cluster, so you can patch both types of software homes within the same maintenance window. Combined patching reduces the brownout time.

  • Advanced patching capabilities: When patching an Oracle Grid Infrastructure or Oracle Database home, Oracle FPP offers a batch mode that speeds the patching process by patching some or all nodes of a cluster in parallel and/or a specific node order, rather than sequentially.

    For Oracle Database homes, you can define disjoint sets of nodes. Each set of nodes is updated sequentially. By defining sets with reference to the database instances running on them, you can minimize the impact of rolling updates by ensuring that services are never taken completely offline. A “smartmove” option is available to help define the sets of batches to meet this goal.

    Integration with Application Continuity is another enhancement to help eliminate the impact of maintenance. This provides the ability to gracefully drain and relocate services within a cluster, completely masking the maintenance from users.

  • Notifications:The Oracle FPP Server is the central repository for the software homes available to the data center. Therefore, it is essential that administrators throughout the data center be aware of changes to the inventory which might impact their areas of responsibility.

    Oracle FPP enables you and other users to subscribe to image series events. Anyone subscribed will be notified by email of any changes to the images available in a particular image series. Also, users can be notified by email when a working copy of a gold image is added to or deleted from a client.

  • Custom workflow support: You can create actions for various Oracle FPP operations, such as importing images, adding or deleting working copies of the gold images, and managing a software home. You can define different actions for each operation, and further differentiate by the type of image to which the operation applies. Actions that you define can be performed before or after the given operation, and are run on the deployment the operation applies to, whether it is the Oracle FPP Server, an Oracle FPP Client, or an rhpclient-less target.

  • Resume failed operations: If an operation, such as adding an image, provisioning a working copy of a gold image, or performing a scale, patch or upgrade fails, then Oracle FPP reports the error and stops. After the problem is corrected (for example, a directory permissions or ownership misconfiguration on a destination node), you can rerun the RHPCTL command that failed, and it will resume from the point of failure. This avoids redoing any work that may have been completed prior to the failure.

  • Audit command: The Oracle FPP Server records all the Oracle FPP operations and also records their outcome (whether success or failure). An audit mechanism enables you to query the audit log in a variety of dimensions, and also to manage its contents and size.

Related Topics

Parent topic: Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning