Patching and Upgrading Oracle Grid Infrastructure

Patching Oracle Grid Infrastructure

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning supports rolling, non-rolling, combined Grid Infrastructure and database patching, and zero-downtime Grid Infrastructure patching. Rolling moves the Grid home sequentially across nodes with rhpctl move gihome, while non-rolling restarts all nodes in parallel and is limited to single-node clusters. Operations can resume after failure or be reverted when using managed working copies, although aborting may leave the environment inconsistent and deleting the source working copy prevents rollback. Combined operations can move Grid and selected database homes together. Zero-downtime patching supports out-of-place 19c RU 19.8 and later deployments with compatible databases, but updates only Grid user-space binaries; operating-system drivers and modules require separate installation and node restarts.

Upgrading Oracle Grid Infrastructure

Fleet Patching and Provisioning can upgrade Oracle Grid Infrastructure to 26ai from 19c or 21c by moving the cluster from a source working copy to a provisioned destination working copy with rhpctl upgrade gihome. For unmanaged source homes, specify the source path and cluster name instead of a working-copy name. The source working copy may be deleted after the upgrade, but doing so removes rollback capability; it should be deleted through rhpctl delete workingcopy to preserve inventory consistency.

Oracle Restart Patching and Upgrading

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning patches or upgrades single-node Oracle Restart environments using gold-image-provisioned homes. During a move, it transfers configuration files such as listener.ora and updates the associated configuration and inventory settings. Use rhpctl move gihome to patch an Oracle Restart home and rhpctl upgrade gihome to move to a higher-version home, specifying the source and destination working copies, target node, and required superuser credentials.

Using Oracle Update Advisor in Oracle FPP Server Mode

Oracle Update Advisor in FPP Server Mode evaluates gold images or Oracle homes, recommends patch levels according to update policies, downloads the recommended patched image, and imports it into an existing gold image. The workflow requires registering an Update Advisor user, running rhpctl evaluate patch to assess or generate an image, monitoring the scheduled job with rhpctl query job, and then applying the resulting image through the standard Oracle AI Database or Grid Infrastructure patching procedures. Images are downloaded to Oracle ACFS, and job output reports health status, recommendations, download progress, and import results.
Read More: Using Oracle Update Advisor in Oracle FPP Server Mode