Patch Migration

During the product implementation lifecycle, patches are normally installed and tested on an environment, and the process is repeated on each environment. The patch migration feature in Enterprise Manager for Oracle Utilities allows administrators to migrate patches to all environments from a central location.

Patch migration is special form of patch installation wherein a source environment is compared to a destination environment. The source environment is used to identify patches that the administrator intends to install in the current/destination environment. The identified patches should have been imported previously for the current target's product, release and platform.

The workflow is as follows:

  1. On the destination environment's target home page, click the Migrate button.
  2. A source target containing the patches to migrate is selected from the dropdown list.
  3. Existing patches installed on both targets are analyzed and a list of patches that are installed on the source (but not on the destination target) is created. This list is compared to the contents of the download staging directory and only the patches that have been previously imported are displayed for selection.
  4. The selected patches are then installed by the patch installation job (the same one used in the patch installation process), updating relevant files in $SPLEBASE. If you deploy manually to the web server, you must perform this step after the installation process completes.

The Process

Patch migration is a three-step process:

  1. Download patches from My Oracle Support (MOS): This step is performed through the My Oracle Support Plug-in within Oracle Enterprise Manager from the top-level menu, choose Enterprise > Provisioning and Patching > Provisioning & Patching.

    Select the Enterprise menu, Provisioning and Patching then Patching & Updates to download patches from My Oracle Support.
  2. Import the downloaded patches: This process allows you to import downloaded patches which are subsequently unpackaged into a format that is compatible with Enterprise Manager for Oracle Utilities's installation process.
  3. Migrate/install the imported patches.
Note: Application server patch components are installed using the standard patch install script. Database patch components are installed using a Java version of the standard CDXPatch.exe utility. Note that patches using the database upgrade-install utility cdxdbi.exe are not supported and the database component of the patch will not be installed.