In this post and some upcoming posts, I’m going to write more about Oracle application servers, a subject we have addressed too little on the Pythian blog.

In this post, I am addressing how to bounce a whole application server, including all tiers and databases from one location. The reason being, I have a request from a client to have the application server be bounced automatically during the weekend to release swaps and to address memory leaks. The application server on this client includes one Mid tier, one Infra tier, and one database (a metarepository database) in three different Oracle homes on two boxes.

As you know, for application server, tiers should be stopped and started up in a specific order. On startup, the sequence is like: database –> listener –> Infra tier –> Mid tier.

For shutdown, the sequence is vice versa. It is not safe to shutdown the database or Infra tier before making sure that the Mid tier is totally done.

So, in order to address client’s request, the basic plan was to have a script to shutdown Mid tier, then handshake with a tscript on the Infra tier to let it know that it is safe to shutdown the Infra tier. We would use the same approach for the Infra shutdown script and database shutdown script.

Is there a simpler way?

opmnctl, the main tool for startup/shutdown of application server components, is able to bounce the whole farm. However, first time you try to run opmnctl status @farm, you may just see the status of AS component only for single box rather than for the whole farm. Why?

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