Upgrading Your Oracle Private Cloud Appliance

1 Upgrading Your Oracle Private Cloud Appliance

This guide provides instructions for an administrator to upgrade the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance or one of its components.

Do not install or upgrade individual packages on the appliance components. Only upgrades as described in this chapter are supported. Security and other updates are provided through patches. Patching is separate from the upgrade functionality and uses a ULN mirror to download supported packages to the shared storage on the management nodes.

Implementation details and technical background information for the upgrade and patching functionality can be found in the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Concepts Guide. Refer to the sections "Upgrade" and "Patching" in the chapter Appliance Administration Overview.

Patching instructions are provided in a separate document. Refer to the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Patching Guide.

Note:

Appliance software version 3.0.2-b1261765 must be upgraded to version 3.0.2-b1392231 using ISO images. During this process, the appliance migrates from Oracle Linux 7 to Oracle Linux 8. This is not supported by ULN-based patching.

Minimum Recommended Version

In this Upgrade Guide it is assumed that your system is running at least the minimum recommended appliance software version: 3.0.2-b1261765. The main chapters provide detailed instructions to move your system on to the latest available version.

If your active Oracle Private Cloud Appliance software is older than the minimum recommended version, please follow the guidelines and instructions in Upgrading from Earlier Software Versions. When the appliance is running at least the minimum recommended version, follow the main instructions to upgrade to the latest version.

Upgrade 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.

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.

Upgrade Order

Components must be upgraded in a prescribed order. The upgrade plan helps manage the order of upgrade operations. For more information, see Check Upgrade Plan Status and Progress.

Oracle-Provided Images

At the end of the full management node cluster upgrade procedure, the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure images are automatically updated. The management node upgrade procedure includes the steps described in Upgrading Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Images so they do not need to be performed separately.

Update Custom CA Certificates

If your Private Cloud Appliance has been configured to use your own CA certificates for secure connection to the external appliance interfaces, you might need to update them after upgrading or patching to a new software version. If the new software version changes the endpoints, for example because a new cloud service was added, the current certificate cannot validate connections to new endpoints. To resolve this, you generate new certificate signing requests (CSR) when the new appliance software is active, ask your Certificate Authority to provide new signed certificates, and upload those to the appliance. All current endpoints are now included in the updated certificates.

For more information about using your own CA certificates, refer to the section "Accessing External Interfaces with Your CA Trust Chain" in the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Administrator Guide.