When moving from one system to another, one of my favorite migration methods is using data guard. It has its restrictions – the destination should be the same platform (exceptions noted in MOS note #413484.1), same version unless you’re performing an upgrade, and that a block-for-block copy of the database is acceptable. Utilizing data guard… Read More »
I spoke with a customer that mentioned they were moving an Exadata rack from one datacenter to another and they had a few questions about what needed to change in order to complete the move. The customer wanted to make the move as much of a “lift and shift” as possible, avoiding the need to… Read More »
As part of the process to get an Exadata rack ready for running 19c databases, many clusters have to go through an upgrade from Oracle Linux 6 to Oracle Linux 7. As part of that upgrade, Oracle took the opportunity to make several configuration changes for security purposes. One of those changes relates to the… Read More »
As part of an ongoing project, I’ve been performing a fair amount of upgrades to 19c on Exadata systems. Several of those systems are virtualized, running Oracle VM (based on Xen). I’ve previously mentioned Oracle’s oedacli tool that can be used to make upgrades easier, and it’s been very useful once you are familiar with… Read More »
One of the cool things that Oracle has done with Exadata is give users the ability to upgrade from Oracle Linux 6 to Oracle Linux 7 with an in-place upgrade process. This comes automatically when you upgrade the Exadata compute image from 18c to 19c. Upgrading the compute nodes to 19c give you the ability… Read More »
As part of the Oracle Exadata Deployment Assistant (“OEDA”), Oracle includes a command line utility to read and modify the XML files used for deployment of an Exadata cluster. Typical use cases are to install additional Oracle database versions, or to create multiple databases before deployment. There are several additional features included for virtualized clusters,… Read More »
I can still remember the surprise when Frits Hoogland pointed out that Oracle had replaced the old OC4J instance on Exadata storage servers with a WebLogic service. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this, but it’s become apparent as things move cloudward that it would enable an entire set of REST operations for… Read More »
While looking at an exachk report for an Exadata rack running in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, I saw an interesting finding: Since this is an Oracle cloud environment, we don’t have any access to view the storage servers – they are managed and maintained by Oracle. For several reasons, I believed this to be a false… Read More »
I was tasked a while back with modifying the IP addresses assigned to the InfiniBand network on an X6-2 rack. We were configuring a ZFS appliance to share between 2 Exadata clusters, and we wanted to keep them on separate network ranges. In this case, we were moving the interfaces from 192.168.10.x/22 (the Exadata default… Read More »
One of the cool new features that was introduced with 18.1.0.0.0 was a subtle change in the Exadata storage server patching process. While not required, this new functionality removes the need to use patchmgr to drive Exadata storage server patches. In Juan Loaiza’s Open World session on new Exadata features, this slide jumped out to… Read More »