Together with Oracle PCA Controller Software Release 2.3.4, a new independent upgrade tool is introduced: the Oracle PCA Upgrader. It is provided as a separate application, with its own release and update schedule. It maintains the phased approach, where management nodes, compute nodes and other rack components are updated in separate procedures, while at the same time it groups and automates sets of tasks that were previously executed as scripted or manual steps. The new design has better error handling and protection against terminal crashes, ssh timeouts or inadvertent user termination. It is intended to reduce complexity and improve the overall upgrade experience.

The Oracle PCA Upgrader was built as a modular framework. Each module consists of pre-checks, an execution phase such as upgrade or install, and post-checks. Besides the standard interactive mode, modules also provide silent mode for programmatic use, and verify-only mode to run pre-checks without starting the execution phase.

The first module developed within the Oracle PCA Upgrader framework, is the management node upgrade. With a single command, it guides the administrator through the pre-upgrade validation steps – now included in the pre-checks of the Upgrader –, software image deployment, Oracle PCA Controller Software update, Oracle Linux operating system Yum update, and Oracle VM Manager upgrade.

In its initial release, intended for use with Oracle PCA Release 2.3.4 and later, the Oracle PCA Upgrader replaces the CLI commands update appliance get_image and update appliance install_image, as well as a large number of pre-upgrade checks.

For software update instructions, see Chapter 3, Updating Oracle Private Cloud Appliance.

For specific Oracle PCA Upgrader details, see Section 3.3, “Oracle PCA 2.3 – Using the Oracle PCA Upgrader”.