Wednesday, March 26, 2008

10.2.0.4 Patchset is out

Just noticed that the 10.2.0.4 patchset is out.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Maybe I'm starting to get it

Yes, another R12 post. It's all I've been doing lately.

When I first installed 11.5.3, I just went with the default two-tier architecture; Web & Forms on the middle-tier and Reports & CCM on the db host. After a while, I realized that was a mistake for my environment. I should have put everything but the db on the middle-tier. Live and learn, I guess.

R12 was my chance to partially correct that mistake. I had a grand plan to migrate my middle-tier services to a hot x86_64 box and leave my db on Solaris. I figured that would give me an easier path if I needed to scale out either tier.

Except Oracle doesn't have a supported upgrade path on multiple platforms yet.

So I bounced a couple ideas off a very helpful Oracle Support Tech and he prefaced each one with "This isn't supported, but you might try...". I finally settled on a plan and executed it.

First, I collapsed my 11.5.9 tiers on to a single Solaris box. I used the Metalink whitepaper and rapidclone to get everything on my db box.

Then, I upgraded to 12.0.0 and applied the 12.0.4 RUP. At that point, I had a working 12.0.4 system with all my middle tier services on Solaris.

Next, I did a fresh install of 12.0.0 on a Linux box telling the configuration that I was going to have two tiers and my db was going to be on Solaris. Then I deleted my network topology and reran autoconfig that populated the db piece of my topology.

The next step was to apply the 12.0.4 patch to the Linux box. I did this with adpatch, but used the "nodatabaseportion" option because I knew I had already applied the object changes to my db.

The final step was running autoconfig on the middle-tier.

Except for a few glitches here and there, it was a surprisingly straight-forward split. Either I'm starting to get this Oracle Apps stuff or Oracle is finally getting serious about their configuration management.