The Linux, Unix and Windows layer that every database and application depends on. Our consultants share what they set up and fix in the field: storage and filesystems, networking, virtualization, SUSE, and hardware such as the Oracle Database Appliance.
By Mouhamadou Diaw Sometimes you need to access to your SQLServer from your Oracle database. There is many ways and tools to do this. In this blog I am describing how to perform this task using ODBC. The configuration is below -Oracle Linux server : serverora 192.168.56.41 with Oracle 19 database orcl -Windows server : winrac1 192.168.56.100 with SQLServer Express…
By Mouhamadou Diaw KVM virtualization uses a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) to create a virtualized environment for your Linux applications.In this blog I want to share some tasks I did at a client. The client is using ODA 19.12. The databases are created on the bare metal and for the applications, we decide to create virtual machines. What do I…
By Mouhamadou Diaw In this blog I am describing the deployment of an ODA with the version 19.12 Following patches will be needed -Patch 30403643: Oracle Database Appliance ISO Image -Patch 30403673: Oracle Database Appliance Grid Infrastructure Clone for ODACLI/DCS stack -Patch 33152232: Oracle Database Appliance Server Patch for ODACLI/DCS Stack -Patch 30403662: Oracle Database Appliance Database Clone 19.12.0.0.210720 for…
Introduction Patching an Oracle Database Appliance is sometimes quite tough and you often struggle to solve failures at different steps. Regarding ILOM and BIOS patching errors, a simple workaround is possible. Errors when patching ILOM and/or BIOS This is something I recently had on an ODA X7-2S when trying to apply patch 19.11. Patching of the test server was OK,…
Introduction Until now, High-Availability (HA) ODAs could have been deployed either in bare metal or in virtualized mode. Virtualized mode means that instead of installing a classic Linux system on the nodes, an OVM hypervisor (based on Xen) was deployed. This hypervisor had at least one VM, a special one called ODA BASE, holding all the databases and having direct…
Introduction Building an Oracle infrastructure today without thinking about a Disaster Recovery solution (DR) is quite rare. This became obvious that a backup or a dump will not help if you do not know where to restore or import once your production server is down. And restoring a backup is definitely not the fastest way to bring back your database…
TL;DR If hardware stays inside your data center, it’s ok to secure erase storage devices. If it leaves your data center (decommission, move to another location), it’s best to physically destroy (shredder) it. Storage devices are not only hard drives, solid state drives, but also the ones holding data temporarily like memory modules (RAM) and CPUs (containing caches, register, …).…
Canonical is consistently promoting Snap Integration in the Ubuntu world with all its market power. However, many do not like this development with Ubuntu. But what options do you still have as an Ubuntu user if you don’t necessarily want to change the distribution? I’ll show you how to run Ubuntu 20.04 with Flatpak instead of Snap and get rid…
Introduction Starting from version 19.11 of the Oracle Database Appliance software bundle, OLVM will definitely replace OVM server as virtualization engine. This change has quite a big impact as there will be no more virtualized specific deployment. Bare metal will come as a standard for all ODAs, and creating VMs for applications, or even databases, will be possible on top…
In this blog I am describing the steps to patch an ODA HA from the version 19.8 to version 19.10. The patching was done with a customer. Thanks to Pierre. The name of the servers were changed The ODA is an X8-HA with following nodes -server-aa -server-ab Before starting the patches, be sure that you have enough space on /…
Introduction Have you ever cloned a database using RMAN? Have you ever gotten the advice not to clone during daytime to avoid performance downgrade on the entire storage or network? For a proof of concept, we wanted to evaluate a Pure Storage array in terms of feasibility and speed of database cloning by using storage-based snapshot technology. First, I want…
Since the beginning of the year, several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux Kernel as well as in others important and widely-used packages. Among them, there was the famous CVE-2021-3156 affecting the sudo package and allowing any unprivileged user to gain root privileges. This one had a base score of 7.8, which is considered as high. This kind of…
