Exadata Patching

Exadata Patching - Download, Extract, Prepare

Let's go through the Exadata machine patching procedure in bullet points based on our patching experience.

Initially planned to write a article for entire patching activity for all database machine components in single post but it will look bit nasty so thought to write a post for each database machine component separately which would be easy to understand.

Exadata patching activity is very easy task if you plan it well.

Well, let's start from downloading the bundle patch and extract it to compute node. 

1. First go to the Oracle Document ID 888828.1, this is the first read requirement for any exadata database machine patching activity.

2. Download required patch as per your setup requirement, in our case it's QFSDP 19625719

QFSDP releases contain the latest software for the following components:

Infrastructure

Exadata Storage Server

InfiniBand Switch

Power Distribution Unit

Database

Oracle Database and Grid Infrastructure PSU

Oracle JavaVM PSU (as of Oct 2014)

OPatch

OPlan

Systems Management

EM Agent

EM OMS

EM Plug-ins

3. Move bundle patch to one of the compute node

List of files:

4. Extract it with unzip utility

Command : #unzip file_name

It will give five tar files as given below

5. Now extract all the tar files using tar utility

Command: #cat *.tar.* | tar -xvf -

It will make single directory with patch number called 19625719

Inside 19625719 directory you will get following directories 

In tree view it will be look like below

Directory view:

File View:

It contained patches for following stacks

• Database/Clusterware
• Database Server
• Storage Server 
• Infiniband 
• PDUs

Don't forget to read thoroughly the all readme multiple times to get proper understanding of database machine patching activity. It will help to complete patching activity smoothly.

Once above steps complete we are ready to go for patching.