3 Prepare for Appliance Patching

Caution:

When upgrading or patching Private Cloud Appliance, ensure that no other Service Enclave operations are ongoing or started. The upgrade or patching process might be adversely affected by appliance administration activities, including but not limited to: compute node operations (such as provisioning or reboot), operations on the management node cluster, configuration changes in any hardware or software component, rack network connectivity changes, password changes, and so on.

Appliance administrators must always use the supported interfaces: the Service CLI and Service Web UI. Performing operations not provided through the API, from the Linux command line and/or with elevated access privileges, is not supported, unless such explicit instructions are provided by Oracle.

Caution:

The granular appliance architecture with built-in redundancy allows administrators to upgrade or patch components without downtime. However, resource capacity and performance might be reduced while an upgrade or patch workflow is in progress.

We recommend that administrators responsible for upgrade or patching notify all Compute Enclave users in advance about such planned maintenance operations.

This is particularly important for users of Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Kubernetes Engine (OKE), because new cluster deployments are not allowed during the maintenance window, and some types of application clusters might experience service interruptions.

For quicker access to software errata and security fixes, and as an alternative to ISO-based upgrades, Oracle provides the software updates for Oracle Private Cloud Appliance through a series of dedicated Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) channels as well. To gain access to these ULN channels, you must register with the Unbreakable Linux Network, subscribe to the Private Cloud Appliance channels, and set up a ULN mirror inside your data center. By configuring the appliance to use the data center ULN mirror as its upstream package source, you give it access to the content of the ULN channels.

To be able to patch your appliance with the RPM packages that provide the latest appliance software, you need to pull the latest packages into the repositories on your ULN mirror, and synchronize the appliance with the ULN mirror. All the packages for a given release have been tested to work with each other and qualified for installation on your rack system.

Before you start a patch procedure, ensure that you have performed these steps:

  1. Configure access to the Private Cloud Appliance packages through a ULN mirror.

  2. Verify that you have the necessary permissions to patch the system.

  3. Back up the current system configuration.

  4. Update the ULN mirror repositories and synchronize the appliance with the mirror.

  5. Preconfigure the patching environment.

  6. Set up the new appliance software sources to run component patch procedures.

Note:

In software version 3.0.2-b1185392 the preparation phase of the upgrade and patching workflows has been redesigned to bring the Upgrader functionality of the latest release into the appliance at the earliest time possible. As a result, some operations are different depending on the active software version of the appliance at the start of the upgrade or patch process. The instructions in this guide cover those differences.

Tools are provided to verify the status of the appliance before, during, and after patching. The patch workflows follow the upgrade plan, which you can consult at any time to track progress.