2 Prepare for Appliance Upgrade

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.

My Oracle Support

Software versions and upgrades for Oracle Private Cloud Appliance are made available for download through My Oracle Support. All files required to upgrade the appliance hardware and software components to a given release are packaged into one or more ISO image files. All the items within the ISOs of a given version have been tested to work with each other and qualified for installation on your rack system.

ISO Naming

The number of ISOs and file naming differs depending on the appliance software version you download. In recent versions, the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform images are packaged in a secondary ISO.

  • Version3.0.2-b1325160 and earlier: single ISO

    File name: pca-3.0.2-<build_no>.iso

  • Version 3.0.2-b1392231 and later: two ISOs

    File names: pca-3.0.2-<build_no>.iso and pca-3.0.2-oci-images-<build_no>.iso

To be able to upgrade your appliance from the ISOs, you need to download the image files to a location from where a web server can make them available to the Private Cloud Appliance management nodes. If multiple ISOs are associated with a release, store them together. Upgrade commands take the primary ISO path as a parameter; it is implied that a secondary ISO is located in the same directory.

If you have set up a bastion host connected to the internal administration network of the appliance, it is convenient to store the ISO images on that machine and run a web server to make the ISOs accessible over HTTP.

Before the Upgrade

Before you start an upgrade procedure, ensure that you have performed these steps:

  1. Download the new software ISO image files to a suitable location.

  2. Verify that you have the necessary permissions to perform an upgrade.

  3. Back up the current system configuration.

  4. Preconfigure the upgrade environment.

  5. Set up the new appliance software sources to run component upgrade procedures.

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