Recovering ODA VMs From Lost ACFS Snapshots

This is a continuation of my previous post regarding dropped ACFS snapshots.  In this scenario, a user logged in to a virtualized ODA system and deleted the underlying ACFS snapshots for multiple virtual machines on the host.  Oracle advises how to back up and restore guest VMs on an ODA in MOS note #1633166.1. The… Read More »

Where’d My VMs Go? Adventures in Simple Linux Forensics

**While the story is true, any identifying details have been changed to protect both the guilty and the innocent** I woke up to a message the other day from a colleague on a project where I occasionally provide assistance.  He was a bit panicked – they use an Oracle Database Appliance as a utility server… Read More »

Checking Flash Cache Mode in Exadata Cloud

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 »

Changing IP Addresses on InfiniBand Network with 12.2 GI on Exadata

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 »

Exadata Storage Server Patching in 18.1.1 and Above

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 »

Thoughts About the Exadata X7-2 Launch

Last week’s Oracle Open World conference included many different announcements – one that impacts my work was the release of a new generation of Exadata machines – this time, the X7-2. If you’ve followed Exadata development over the years, there has been a typical set of features that come in with each release: Increase in… Read More »

Parallelizing datapatch execution

When applying quarterly PSUs to an Oracle database, there are generally two steps – one step that applies updates to the binaries inside the Oracle home, and one step that updates objects inside the database catalog via registry$sqlpatch. The first step has long been performed with OPatch, but beginning with Oracle 12.1.0.1, the second task… Read More »

Exadata Cell Patching – USB I/O Errors

I was playing around with the Exadata X2-2 in the Enkitec lab this weekend, and hit an interesting issue when patching the storage servers.  We were taking the system up to version 12.1.2.3.3 for testing purposes.  I fired off the patchmgr script, and one of the storage servers failed when beginning the first phase of the patching… Read More »