1. Patching Guide
  2. Patching Individual Components

6 Patching Individual Components

The granular patching mechanism allows you to perform patching procedures for individual hardware and software components. Besides the components included in the management node patch, you can also patch different categories of firmware, the operating system and appliance-specific software on the compute nodes, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure images.

All components must be patched in a prescribed order. The upgrade plan will prevent a component patch procedure from starting if the preceding patch operations have not been completed.

Note:

In general, firmware may be patched whenever new versions are made available for your system. Firmware patches can be applied in no particular order and independently of other components.

However, there is an extra requirement: when patching to appliance software version 3.0.2-b1081557 or later, the ZFS Storage Appliance firmware must be patched before all other components.

This is the order of operations enforced through the upgrade plan:

  1. Prepare upgrade environment (Upgrade PreConfig and PreUpgrade)

  2. ZFS Storage Appliance firmware (version 3.0.2-b1081557 or later)

  3. Compute nodes

  4. Management nodes

  5. MySQL cluster database

  6. Etcd

  7. Vault

  8. Kubernetes cluster

  9. Platform (containerized microservices)

Every patch operation is preceded by a set of pre-checks. These are built into the code and will report an error if the system is not in the required state for patching. Patching will only begin if all pre-checks are passed.

You can use the pre-checks to test in advance for any system health issues that would prevent a successful patch. After preparing the environment for patching, run any or all of the patch commands with the "verify only" option. In the Service Web UI this option is activated with a check box when you create the patch request; in the Service CLI you use the optional patch command parameter shown in this example: 

PCA-ADMIN> patchKubernetes ULN=http://host.example.com/yum verifyOnly=True
[...]

PCA-ADMIN> getUpgradeJobs
  id                                      upgradeRequestId                           commandName          result
  --                                      ----------------                           -----------          ------
  1632849609034-kubernetes_verify-10575   UWS-8995e5b7-a237-4717-bb5c-01f1cf85daf0   kubernetes_verify    Passed

If issues are detected, you can resolve them before the planned patch window, and keep the actual patching operations as fluent and short as possible.

Note:

This function is available when the appliance is running software version 3.0.2-b892153 or later.