Ensuring the System Is In Ready State

Upgrades can be performed with limited impact on the system. No downtime is required, and user workloads continue to run while the underlying infrastructure is being upgraded in stages. However, it is considered good practice to ensure that backups are created of the system and the resources in your environment.

Every upgrade operation is preceded by a set of pre-checks. These are built into the upgrade code and will report an error if the system is not in the required state for the upgrade. The upgrade 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 upgrade. After preparing the upgrade environment, run any or all of the upgrade commands with the "verify only" option.

Caution:

Oracle strongly recommends testing that the Private Cloud Appliance is ready for upgrading, by executing the full management node upgrade command in verify-only mode. The output provides a readiness report you can use to plan any corrective actions as well as the upgrade.

In the Service Web UI the verify-only option is activated with a check box when you create the upgrade request; in the Service CLI you use the optional upgrade command parameter shown in this example:

PCA-ADMIN> upgradeKubernetes verifyOnly=True
[...]

PCA-ADMIN> getUpgradeJobs
  id                                      upgradeRequestId                           commandName          result
  --                                      ----------------                           -----------          ------
  1632849609034-kubernetes_verify-35545   UWS-8995e5b7-a237-4717-bb5c-01f1cf85daf0   kubernetes_verify    Passed

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

Note:

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

It is important to note that concurrent upgrade operations are not supported. An upgrade job must be completed before a new one can be started.