18c runInstaller -silent

By Franck Pachot

.
You find two different ‘runInstaller’ under an Oracle Home. The old one, the Oracle Universal Installer, in $ORACLE_HOME/oui/bin. And the new one, in $ORACLE_HOME directly. They have the same name but are completely different. The old one was used to install an Oracle Home from the installation media. But in 18c you don’t use it. It has been used by Oracle to build the Oracle Home image. Then you download and unzip directly your Oracle Home. You have only to configure it and re-link the binaries. And this is done by the new runInstaller which is at the root of the Oracle Home. Actually, it is just a shell script that runs the Perl dbSetup.pl to setup the Oracle Database software. In my opinion, it would be better to have it called dbSetup.sh rather than rename it to runInstaller, especially given that the same thing for Grid Infrastructure is called GridSetup.sh since 12cR2. The Perl script finally runs the Java GUI. It can also be run in command line, aka silent mode, which is the goal of this post. The command line arguments are similar, but not the same as in the old runInstaller.

Prerequisites

You may want to run the prerequisites only to check if your system is ready for the installation. Here is how to do so in command line:

$ $ORACLE_HOME/runInstaller -silent -executePrereqs -responseFile $ORACLE_HOME/inventory/response/db_install.rsp
 
Launching Oracle Database Setup Wizard...
 
[FATAL] [INS-13013] Target environment does not meet some mandatory requirements.
   CAUSE: Some of the mandatory prerequisites are not met. See logs for details. /u00/app/oraInventory/logs/InstallActions2018-08-11_06-07-14PM/installActions2018-08-11_06-07-14PM.log
   ACTION: Identify the list of failed prerequisite checks from the log: /u00/app/oraInventory/logs/InstallActions2018-08-11_06-07-14PM/installActions2018-08-11_06-07-14PM.log. Then either from the log file or from installation manual find the appropriate configuration to meet the prerequisites and fix it manually.

From there we can check the log about the tests that have failed, such as in the following example:

INFO:  [Aug 11, 2018 6:08:21 PM] Physical Memory: This is a prerequisite condition to test whether the system has at least 8GB (8388608.0KB) of total physical memory.
INFO:  [Aug 11, 2018 6:08:21 PM] Severity:IGNORABLE
INFO:  [Aug 11, 2018 6:08:21 PM] OverallStatus:VERIFICATION_FAILED
INFO:  [Aug 11, 2018 6:08:21 PM] *********************************************
INFO:  [Aug 11, 2018 6:08:21 PM] Run Level: This is a prerequisite condition to test whether the system is running with proper run level.
INFO:  [Aug 11, 2018 6:08:21 PM] Severity:CRITICAL
INFO:  [Aug 11, 2018 6:08:21 PM] OverallStatus:VERIFICATION_FAILED
INFO:  [Aug 11, 2018 6:08:21 PM] *********************************************
INFO:  [Aug 11, 2018 6:08:21 PM] OS Kernel Version: This is a prerequisite condition to test whether the system kernel version is at least "2.6.39-400.211.1".
INFO:  [Aug 11, 2018 6:08:21 PM] Severity:CRITICAL
INFO:  [Aug 11, 2018 6:08:21 PM] OverallStatus:VERIFICATION_FAILED

Software Install

You can pass all parameters in command line (‘runInstaller -silent -help’ to see all possibilities), but in all cases you need a response file. Then I put everything I need in the response file. There’s no mention of the ORACLE_HOME because you already unzipped it at the right place. The most important is the edition which seems to accept [EE, SEONE, SE2, HP, XP, PE]. I didn’t try it but Standard Edition One is for versions <= 12.1.0.1 by the way.

cd $ORACLE_HOME
 
cat > db18EE.rsp <<END
oracle.install.responseFileVersion=/oracle/install/rspfmt_dbinstall_response_schema_v18.0.0
oracle.install.option=INSTALL_DB_SWONLY
UNIX_GROUP_NAME=oinstall
INVENTORY_LOCATION=/u00/app/oraInventory
ORACLE_BASE=/u00/app/oracle
oracle.install.db.InstallEdition=EE
oracle.install.db.OSDBA_GROUP=dba
oracle.install.db.OSOPER_GROUP=oper
oracle.install.db.OSBACKUPDBA_GROUP=backupdba
oracle.install.db.OSDGDBA_GROUP=dgdba
oracle.install.db.OSKMDBA_GROUP=kmdba
oracle.install.db.OSRACDBA_GROUP=dba
END

There is no need for the oracle.install.db.config variables because I’ll install the software only without creating a database.

Here is how to run the dbSetup. You can use ‘-ignorePrereqFailure’ to ignore the prerequisites if you want to install to a host where some prerequisites fail:

./runInstaller -silent -noconfig -ignorePrereqFailure -responseFile ./db18EE.rsp

 
The log of the installation goes into the oraInventory/logs and, as usual, you have to run the root.sh

As a root user, execute the following script(s):
        1. /u00/app/oracle/product/18SE/root.sh
 
Execute /u00/app/oracle/product/18SE/root.sh on the following nodes:
[vmreforatun01]

This new runInstaller can also apply one-off patches with -applyOneOffs mentioning the patch locations. You can also build an Oracle Home image that you customize, with -createGoldImage -destinationLocation and even mention some files or path to exclude to make it smaller: -exclFiles