Exadata Patching Overview
Hello everyone !
For my first time posting here on the Pythian Blog, I would like to share some of my tips/notes about patching Oracle Exadata, based on my experiences and not less important, research and googling =).
First, the Oracle Exadata Patch has 3 different components that should be patched. As we know about Oracle Exadata, the Exadata rack has a different components, like Cisco Switch, KVM, Power Distribuion Unit, etc… and we only are responsible for patching the Database Servers (usually referenced as compute nodes), Storage Servers (usually referenced as cell nodes) and the Infiniband Switches.
We can divide the patches in 3 different parts:
Storage Server Patch
Database Server Patch
Infiniband Switches Patch
Before starting, I would like to share and note here 2 documents from My Oracle Support, aka metalink. These notes must be the first place that you need to go to review before patching the Exadata environment.
Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server 11g Release 2 (11.2) Supported Versions (Doc ID. 888828.1)
- This is for the second and third generation (V2 and X2) for Oracle Exadata, using Sun hardware.Database Machine and Exadata Storage Server 11g Release 1 (11.1) Supported Versions (Doc ID. 835032.1)
- This is for the first generation (V1) for Oracle Exadata, using HP hardware.
Oracle usually updates these documents for every patch that is released, including different information about that.
