Oracle Fleet Patching & Provisioning: Your Solution for all Database Lifecycle Operations

Oracle Fleet Patching & Provisioning (FPP) is Oracle’s software lifecycle management method for provisioning, patching, and upgrading Oracle Grid Infrastructure (GI) and Oracle Database, including Real Application Clusters (RAC) across your database fleet. FPP facilitates lifecycle operations, including installing, upgrading, and patching Grid Infrastructure (GI) and Oracle Database fleets (single instance & RAC). Formerly known as Rapid Home Provisioning (RHP), Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning has been enhanced and is now the recommended solution for customers to automate all of these tasks.

Database availability, performance, and security are critical to all organizations. When you have a handful of databases, keeping them up and running and performing well can be straightforward. But as an organization grows to 10s, 100s, or more databases, ensuring everything operates well becomes very challenging. FPP is very useful in these scenarios, making it very easy to provision, patch, and upgrade databases by automating the whole process.

FPP is configured on an Oracle GI cluster node (NOT on Oracle Restart Server) and utilizes Grid Infrastructure (GI) components like Grid Infrastructure Management Repository (GIMR) and Automatic Storage Management (ASM).

You can configure FPP on existing GI installation or during the fresh GI installation. To configure FPP, perform the following steps: 

• Create a disk group using the ASMCA utility and provide a mount point to store gold images.
• Configure Grid Infrastructure Repository (GIMR)

• $ $GRID_HOME/bin/mgmtca createGIMRContainer -storageDiskLocation DATA

• Add Grid Naming Service (GNS) Virtual IP (VIP) address without zone delegation.

• # $GRID_HOME/bin/srvctl add gns -vip fpp-gnsvip

• # $GRID_HOME/bin/srvctl start gns -vip

• Remove local rhpserver installed during GI install.

• # $GRID_HOME/bin/srvctl stop rhpserver

• # $GRID_HOME/bin/srvctl remove rhpserver

• Create Fleet Patching & Provisioning Server (rhpserver) resource.

• # $GRID_HOME/bin/srvctl add rhpserver -storage <patch_created_in_first_step_above> -diskgroup DATA

• # su – oracle

• $ $GRID_HOME/bin/srvctl start rhpserver

FPP performs out-of-place patching and upgrades to achieve the minimum downtime possible for Database and Grid Infrastructure (GI) homes. It also supports zero downtime GI patching and zero downtime database upgrades using GoldenGate or Data Guard.  

To better understand the process, let’s review how FPP patches single instances and RAC databases. As you read the documentation, you will come across terms like “gold image” and “working copy” for FPP operations. “Gold image” refers to a specific database/gi software version, e.g. 19.13. 

“Working copy” refers to the Oracle home on the system, i.e. /u01/app/product/19.0/dbhome_1.

• For single-instance database patching, FPP installs a new working copy from the latest gold image you created. FPP then moves some or all databases from the old Oracle home/old working copy to this new working copy.
• For a RAC database, FPP creates a new working copy on one node at a time, moving the services to another node, moving the instance from the old working copy to the new working copy, and then moving the services back from another node. Following the first node, FPP performs similar operations on all other nodes and executes a datapatch at the end. FPP operations are transparent to session draining and application continuity if they are in use.

The FPP server communicates with FPP client systems over SSH for the initial deployment and then JMX port 8896 (default) afterward. If you are using a non-default SSH port in your environment, then you need to apply a one-off patch 33869288. You may need to contact Oracle support and create a service request to get a patch, depending on the Oracle software version you are running.

FPP is licensed as a part of Real Application Clusters (RAC) or the Database Lifecycle Management Pack. Please reach out to Mythics sales team for more details.

FPP is integrated with Fleet maintenance from Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) 13.5 Release Update 14 (13.5.0.14). Many environments running Oracle Databases already use OEM, which gives customers an option to use a GUI console to use FPP.

Integrating OEM with advanced features like Fleet Patching and Provisioning can be challenging to many customers, but it provides customers with significant benefits and time savings. Mythics has implemented these features for customers, and we provide services for this and many other Oracle components. With a large team of experienced consultants, we can help you with these challenges and improve the overall running of your Oracle operations. For more information or to see a demonstration of these features, please reach out to our team at sales@mythics.com.