1 Patching Your Oracle Private Cloud Appliance

This document describes the patching process for your Oracle Private Cloud Appliance. Upgrading your appliance is a different process, refer to the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Upgrade Guide for those directions.

Starting with release 3.0.1, Oracle Private Cloud Appliance supports patching updates for security fixes and software errata between major releases. To take advantage of this feature you must configure your environment to support channel updates.

Patches are delivered as RPM packages through a series of dedicated channels on the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). To gain access to these channels, you need a Customer Support Identifier (CSI) and a ULN subscription.

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance is not allowed to connect directly to Oracle ULN servers. You must use a ULN mirror on a system inside the data center. The patch channels are then synchronized on the ULN mirror, where the management nodes can access the RPMs. Compute nodes need access to a subset of the RPMs, which are copied to a designated location on the appliance internal shared storage and kept up-to-date.

Patching Strategy

We recommend to run the latest available software on your Oracle Private Cloud Appliance. It improves protection against vulnerabilities and allows you to take advantage of all new features, bug fixes, and functional improvements.

Systems running an appliance software version older than 3.0.2-b892153 require a two-phase process to get the latest version. The appliance must first be upgraded to version 3.0.2-b892153; patching to this version is not possible. After this upgrade operation has been completed successfully, you can upgrade or patch to version 3.0.2-b1081557. An administrator must manually verify the upgrade path to the new target version.

The latest Upgrader code automatically enforces prerequisite software versions. During the upgrade or patch preparations, the Upgrader service validates the currently installed appliance software version against the new target version. If the appliance is not running at least the minimum required version, the Upgrader exits the process and rolls back the environment to its previous state. You must first install the prerequisite version as indicated in the log.

Patching Order

Components must be patched in a prescribed order. In appliance software version 3.0.2-b892153 and later, the upgrade plan helps manage the order of patch operations. When patching to version 3.0.2-b1081557 or later, there is an extra requirement to patch the ZFS Storage Appliance firmware before all other components. For more information, see Checking Upgrade Plan Status and Progress.