List,
I have been playing around with central inventory lately. Apparently, we have
huge boxes with many DBs(40+) on them, and we don't share Oracle Homes between
databases. While this offers nice isolation in terms of maintenance to a
particular home, but it is a nightmare getting them patched.
By design, central inventory gets locked whenever there is maintenance on any
Oracle Home. This results in operational difficulties to get all databases on
the host patched, quickly.
Anyway, as a possible resolution, I am experimenting with central inventory.
Oracle allows having independent central inventory for each home. However, I
see Oracle has inherent hard dependency on /etc/oraInst.loc for central
inventory location.
Upon grid install, /etc/oraInst.loc points to central inventory created, which
has info about CRS. Now, if I were to implement separate central inventory for
each new home. I have to remove /etc/oraInst.loc so that next Oracle Home (DB)
install creates its own central inventory. However, if I remove oraInst.loc, it
results in Bug 29716919(raised an ER), for db home install. As a workaround, I
create an empty /etc/oraInst.loc and installer runs fine. I have to repeat same
thing, for all new homes. You can see where this is going. This also means, I
cant do 2 parallel installs either('d love to have it though).
My initial rationale was keeping separate central inventory shall allow me to
do parallel patching of db homes. Although, this has worked so far, as opatch
supports invPtrloc flag, doesn't directly depend upon /etc/oraInst.loc.
Interestingly, not all utilities do...e.g. Runinstall in OH doesn't have this
flag, while runinstall in OH/oui/bin does. :P
My worries grow...
1. when I decide to do deinstalls, via deinstall utility. If
/etc/oraInst.loc doesn't exist deinstall utility errors out (ERROR: null). This
means, if I were to have deinstall and install run on separate homes at
sametime, in parallel. It won't work. Workaround, do a hard deinstall(rm),
after dropping db.
2. If I don't have /etc/oraInst.loc, adrci wonders where is ADR_BASE,
(adrci_dir.mif file workaround doesn't work). I have to explicitly export
ADR_BASE on prompt to work.
3. Goldimage deployment(INSTALL_DB_SWONLY) doesn't work if /etc/oraInst.loc
doesn't exist.
4. It is even messier when we move to RAC systems. Although, having an empty
/etc/oraInst.loc on first node allows installer to work.
How do you handle multiple homes on a box, in your environments? How do make
patching faster?
Thanks,
Yogi
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