Introduction Once your brand new Oracle Database Appliance is racked and connected to power, the first configuration step is to setup the static IP address on the management console (ILOM). Until ODA X6-2 generation, servers were equipped with a VGA connector, and it was possible to configure ILOM IP in the BIOS of each ODA node using a keyboard and…
Introduction Patch 19.15 is now available on Oracle Database Appliance. It’s time to test it. What’s new? This version brings April’s PSU to database and grid homes with their bug fixes, as usual. It also brings latest database 21.6 but only for DB Systems (21c being an innovation release). As you may know, new ODA X9-2 is here with 3…
Updated the 10th of June, 2022: add PMEM option on X9-2L. Introduction It’s been nearly 3 years that Oracle Database Appliance X8-2 reached the market, and in 2022 it’s still a great performer. But now it’s time for a refresh: X9-2 specs have just been published by Oracle, and machines should be soon available. So what’s new? What is Oracle…
Introduction Patch 19.14 is now available on Oracle Database Appliance. It’s time to test it. What’s new? This version brings January’s PSU to database and grid homes with their bug fixes, as usual. It also brings latest 21.5 but only for DB Systems (21c being an innovation release). Don’t expect too many new features for this release (actually, I don’t…
Introduction Oracle Database Appliance now fully supports virtualization with KVM, and this could be interesting for some of us. If you’re using Enterprise Edition, you probably decreased the number of cores to comply with your licenses. Now you can increase your core configuration with more cores, some being dedicated to your databases, and some for user-managed VMs. Let’s find out…
Introduction Patch 19.13 is now available on ODA. It’s time to test it. What’s new? This version brings October’s PSU to database and grid homes with their bug fixes, as usual. It also brings 21.4 for DB Systems (21c being an innovation release, understand just for testing). Something new that some of us have been waiting for a while, a…
Introduction As virtualization is available for all ODAs now, you could ask yourself if it’s a good idea to use this virtualization or not. Databases can be created as bare metal, but also within a DB System for better isolation. And both can be used on the same ODA. If you’re looking for how to deploy an ODA with KVM…
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 Beginning with Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) 19.11. the ORACLE_BASE and ORACLE_HOMEs are created on ACFS. That’s good news, because there is much more space on ASM than on the internal disks, i.e. no space issues with /u01 anymore. So how does it work? ORACLE_BASE and ORACLE_HOME on ACFS When installing an ODA from scratch then ORACLE_BASE and ORACLE_HOME are…
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…
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…
