Introduction One of the key features of the ODA (Oracle Database Appliance) is the ability to patch the entire stack every three months, the goal being to keep all the components up-to-date. Most of the customers won’t patch so often, but one patch a year is quite a good average. But when comes the time for patching, comes the time…
Introduction Reimaging an ODA is a good practice for a lot of reasons. To make your ODA cleaner if it’s running for many years and if you patch regularly. To simplify patching because if you’re late you could have to apply multiple intermediate patches to reach the target version. Or simply because you need to change the configuration (for example…
Even you don’t need 18c, or you’re not ready for this release, this patch will also update your 11gR2, 12cR1 and 12cR2 databases to the latest PSU available on ODA, it means for example the patchset from last July if you’re using 12cR1. Here is how to apply this latest patch for your ODA lite. In this example, the patch…
Introduction When you work on ODA you sometimes get struggled with local filesystem free space. ODA has terabytes of space on data disks, but local disks are still limited to a raid-1 array of 2x 480GB disks. And only few GB are dedicated to / and /u01 filesystems. You do not need hundreds of GB on these filesystems, but I…
Introduction It has been 5 years I’m working on ODA and I now have a quite good overview of the pros and the cons of such a solution. On one hand, ODA can greatly streamline your Oracle Database environment if you understand the purpose of this appliance. On the other hand, ODA can be your nightmare if you’re not using…
Introduction X3-2 and X4-2 ODAs are still very capable pieces of hardware in 2018. With 256GB of RAM and at least 16 cores per node, and with 18TB RAW disk capacity as a standard these appliances are far from obsolete even you probably don’t have any more support on the hardware from Oracle. If you own several ODAs of this…
Facing an internal inconsistency in the ODA derby database is very painful (see https://www.dbi-services.com/blog/oda-lite-what-is-this-odacli-repository/ for more info about the derby database). I have recently faced a case where the database deletion was failing and the database remained then in “Deleting” status. Connecting directly to the internal derby database and doing some self cleaning is very risky and should be performed at…
Here is how to apply the latest patch for your ODA. As usual the Oracle documentation is not 100% accurate. I applied this patch on 2 ODAs X7-2M previously deployed in 12.2.1.2.0, no intermediate patch was needed. 1) Download the patch The patch number is 28216794. This patch will update the following components: dcs (odacli), operating system, bios/firmwares, ilom, GI,…
Deploying new Bare Metal ODA X7-2S or 2M, I have been curious how configure-firstnet would interact with the fiber and copper ethernet network interfaces. Reading documentation on the web, I could not clearly understand if it is mandatory to have the ODA connected to the LAN when performing an ODA reimage and/or running the configure-firstnet in additionnal of having ILOM…
Configuring fiber interfaces during an ODA installation can sometime been challenging. The configuration can depend on the kind of gigabit interface converter (GBIC) and switch been used. In this blog, I would like to show a real case faced during one of our customer deployment, and come with a solution. Problem We were facing link detection issue when using the…
A long time ago, ODA referred to the only model that existed (nearly). Actually, not so long time ago, as ODA X3, X4 and X5 were released between 2013 and 2015. And it was quite the same hardware. Now there is 3 current models in the X7 range, and they were 4 in the previous generation (X6). ODA is now…
To perform some tests in order to determine the accurate number of cores to be used by the database application, I had to increase and decrease the number of CPU cores on an ODA using the DCS stack. When increasing would never be a problem, decreasing number of CPU cores would fail into a DCS-10045 error. The ODA was initialized…
