Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Architecture

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning (Oracle FPP) architecture consists of an Oracle FPP Server and any number of Oracle FPP Clients.

Oracle recommends deploying the Oracle FPP Server in a multi-node cluster so that it is highly available. Oracle FPP Server supports single-node deployment, but it is not recommended.

Note:

The Oracle FPP Server needs an Oracle Clusterware installation, thus you can not configure Oracle FPP Server on an Oracle Restart server.

The Oracle FPP Server cluster is a repository for all data, of which there are primarily two types:

Gold images
Metadata related to users, roles, permissions, and identities

The Oracle FPP Server acts as a central server for provisioning Oracle AI Database homes, Oracle Grid Infrastructure homes, and other application software homes, making them available to the cluster hosting the Oracle FPP Server and to the Oracle FPP Client clusters, and rhpclient-less targets.

Users operate on the Oracle FPP Server or Oracle FPP Client to request deployment of Oracle homes or to query gold images. When a user makes a request for an Oracle home, specifying a gold image, the Oracle FPP Client communicates with the Oracle FPP Server to pass on the request. The Oracle FPP Server processes the request by taking appropriate action to instantiate a copy of the gold image, and to make it available to the Oracle FPP Client cluster using available technologies such as Oracle Advanced Cluster File System (Oracle ACFS) and local file systems.

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server

The Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning (Oracle FPP) Server is a highly available software provisioning system that uses Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM), Oracle Advanced Cluster File System (Oracle ACFS), application VIPs, and other components.

The Oracle FPP Server primarily acts as a central server for provisioning Oracle homes and making them available to Oracle FPP Clients and rhpclient-less targets.

Features of the Oracle FPP Server:

Efficiently stores gold images and image series for the managed homes, including separate binaries, and metadata related to users, roles, and permissions.
Stores working copies and Oracle FPP Client information.
Provides a list of available homes to Oracle FPP Clients and rhpclient -less targets upon request.
Patch a software home once and then deploy the home to any Oracle FPP Client or any rhpclient -less targets, instead of patching every site.
Provides the ability to report on existing deployments.
Deploys homes on physical servers and virtual machines.
Notifies subscribers of changes to image series.
Maintains an audit log of all RHPCTL commands run.

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Clients and Targets

The Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning (Oracle FPP) Client is part of Oracle Clusterware. Users operate on an Oracle FPP Client to perform tasks such as requesting deployment of Oracle homes and listing available gold images.

Note:

The Oracle FPP Server release must be later than or equal to the Oracle FPP Client software release, including the Release Update (RU). For example, if Oracle FPP Server is 23.4, the Oracle FPP Client must also be 23.4.

When a user requests an Oracle home specifying a gold image, the Oracle FPP Client communicates with the Oracle FPP Server to pass on the request. The Oracle FPP Server processes the request by instantiating a working copy of the gold image and making it available to the Oracle FPP Client using Oracle ACFS or a different local file system.

Oracle FPP Client has Oracle Clusterware and the additional rhpclient component enabled. This additional rhpclient component enables the Oracle FPP Client to initiate the tasks.

The Oracle FPP Client:

Provides a list of available homes from the Oracle FPP Server.
Has full functionality in Oracle Clusterware 12c release 2 (12.2) and can communicate with Oracle FPP Servers from Oracle Clusterware 12c release 2 (12.2), or later.

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Targets

Computers of which Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning (Oracle FPP) is aware are known as rhpclient-less targets, which do not have the rhpclient component enabled.

Oracle FPP Servers can create new rhpclient-less targets, and can also install and configure Oracle Grid Infrastructure on such targets with only an operating system installed. Subsequently, Oracle FPP Server can provision database and other software on those rhpclient-less targets, perform maintenance, scale the cluster, in addition to many other operations. All Oracle FPP commands are run on the Oracle FPP Server.

rhpclient-less targets running the Oracle FPP Client in Oracle Clusterware 12c release 2 (12.2), and later, may also run many of the Oracle FPP commands to request new software from the Oracle FPP Server and initiate maintenance themselves, among other tasks.

Note:

The Oracle FPP Server communicates with Oracle Grid Infrastructure Clusters at version 12.2.0.1 and later through an Oracle FPP Client that can be configured and started up on the destination cluster. The Oracle FPP Client is not supported for rhpclient-less targets on Oracle Grid Infrastructure version 12.1 and earlier, on all versions of Oracle Restart and database standalone rhpclient-less targets, such as database homes without an Oracle Grid Infrastructure home.

Oracle FPP Metadata Repository

Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 26ai, you can configure either a local or an external metadata repository for your Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning (Oracle FPP) Server.

You can create an external metadata repository and provide its information during Oracle FPP setup or upgrade.

Oracle FPP Server has the following metadata repository configuration workflows:

If the external metadata repository option is specified, then you must provide a database connection string. The Oracle FPP Server automatically creates a schema in the database to store metadata. Use the -dbtype EXTERNAL -connstr db_connect_string -dbadmin db_user parameters to configure an external metadata repository.
If the external metadata repository option is not specified, then Oracle FPP Server automatically creates a database to store metadata.

If you do not use Oracle FPP self-upgrade feature, then you need to upgrade Oracle FPP metadata repository separately because database credentials can not be passed to the installer. In such a case, Oracle FPP Server remains disabled until the metadata repository upgrade is complete. If you try to start the Oracle FPP Server, then you will get an error asking to run the upgrade command.

Note:

Multiple Oracle FPP Servers can share the same CDB, however, they require separate metadata repositories. You must create a separate PDB for each Oracle FPP Server to avoid schema name conflicts.