1. Administrator's Guide
  2. Oracle ASM Instances and Disk Groups
  3. Administering Oracle ASM Instances
  4. Upgrading and Patching Oracle ASM

Upgrading and Patching Oracle ASM

This section contains the following topics:

Note:

  • For Oracle RAC environments, the Oracle Clusterware version number must be at least equal to the version number of the patch that you are applying to the Oracle Database.

  • You must apply the patch to the Oracle Grid Infrastructure home before you apply it to the Oracle Database home.

About Oracle ASM Rolling Upgrade

Oracle ASM rolling upgrade enables you to independently upgrade or patch clustered Oracle ASM nodes without affecting database availability which provides greater uptime.

Rolling upgrade means that some features of a clustered Oracle ASM environment continue to function when one or more of the nodes in the cluster uses different software versions. Oracle recommends that you perform an Oracle ASM rolling upgrade when performing an Oracle Clusterware rolling upgrade.

To perform a rolling upgrade, your environment must be prepared. Oracle Clusterware must be fully upgraded to the next patch or release version before you start the Oracle ASM rolling upgrade. In addition, you should prepare your Oracle Clusterware in a rolling upgrade manner to ensure high availability and maximum uptime.

Note that Oracle ASM is upgraded with Oracle Clusterware for Oracle 11g Release 2 (11.2) or later as both are in the Oracle Grid Infrastructure home.

Note:

  • Rolling upgrades only apply to clustered Oracle ASM instances, and you can only perform rolling upgrades on environments with Oracle Database 11g or later. You cannot use this feature to upgrade from Oracle Database 10g to Oracle Database 11g.

  • See Oracle Exadata documentation for information about performing a rolling upgrading of an Oracle ASM instance when Oracle Exadata storage is present.

See Also:

About Oracle ASM Rolling Patches

You can apply patches in a clustered Oracle ASM environment to update one node at a time to the latest patch level without affecting the overall availability of the Oracle ASM cluster or the database clusters using Oracle ASM for storage.

The ALTER SYSTEM ROLLING PATCH SQL statement enables you to start and stop rolling patches. For example: 

SQL> ALTER SYSTEM START ROLLING PATCH;

SQL> ALTER SYSTEM STOP ROLLING PATCH;

You can determine if the cluster is in rolling patch mode by executing a SYS_CONTEXT SQL query for Cluster State. A new state (In Rolling Patch) is added to informing the user that the cluster is in rolling patch mode.

The queries in Example 3-2 display information about rolling patches. To run these queries, you must be connected to the Oracle ASM instance in the Grid home, and the Grid Infrastructure home must be configured with the Oracle Clusterware option for an Oracle RAC environment.

You can view all the patch Ids applied on the node and cluster by querying the V$PATCHES view.

ASMCMD commands for rolling patches include:

  • showclusterstate

  • showpatches

  • showversion

Example 3-2 Determining rolling patch mode and patch level

SELECT SYS_CONTEXT('SYS_CLUSTER_PROPERTIES', 'CLUSTER_STATE') FROM DUAL;

SELECT SYS_CONTEXT('SYS_CLUSTER_PROPERTIES', 'CURRENT_PATCHLVL') FROM DUAL;

See Also: