AIX/HA Oracle Upgrade

[Former Member]

I've completed a number of Oracle upgrades from 10g to 11g but none on an AIX/Oracle cluster.

I checked the SAP upgrade guides and none of them mention/discuss cluster upgrade methodology.

Has anyone here done such an upgrade?

Would you care to elaborate the differences between a single system upgrade vs/ an instance running on a HA cluster please?

Are there any central or important notes that I should take a look at?

I have searched for documents under the HA links, Oracle database upgrade and documents under various SAP products for this information but have been unable to find a guide, if there is a location that I've missed, could you point that out as well please?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

All,

Many thanks for your helpful replies.

I have two nodes managed by Veritas Cluster Services running a solution manager & a dialog instance with a clustered Oracle 10g DB instance.

Does that mean that all I need to do is to ask the cluster control team to freeze the services on,  say Node1, upgrade the DB S/W to 11g followed to DB upgrade and then ask them to test the failover?

Do I need to do any activity on the other box?

Thanks again for your helpful replies.

[nirmal_konchada · Accepted solution]

Hello ,

As your database is only on one node, you need to upgrade Oracle on that node.

During this upgrade it would be better to freeze your cluster and then activate it once the upgrade is complete. Also make sure you upgrade your DR server if present.

No special procedure needed for cluster.

Regards,

Nirmal.

[Reagan · Accepted solution]

Hello Kevin

First make sure that the AIX is patched with the required TL level and also with all the APAR's for Oracle 11G.

Oracle Database Preinstallation Tasks

Online operation:

Install the Oracle 11G software on the newly created file system /oracle/SID/11203

Install the latest SBP

Follow the upgrade guide and run pre-upgrade scripts

Offline operation:

Stop DB and SAP on all nodes

Stop listener

Start the DBUA script and get the DB upgraded.

Once the upgrade has been completed ask the OS or cluster team to initiate a fail-over test to see everything works fine as expected.

You don't need to do any additional steps.

Regards

RB

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

also make sure after upgrading the database you perform the switch over the database group to another and test.

[Former Member]

MANY Thanks again guys, super response.

Not to take anything away from the other replies but thanks for the step by step guide.

I'm going to leave the question unanswered at the moment and add my experiences before marking it answered to serve as a future reference for similar situations.

[Reagan]

I have done Oracle upgrades on HACMP solution.

It is just the same process.

You just need to do a failover and fallback test once the upgrade has been completed to ensure the applications work as expected.

Regards

RB

[former_member182307]

Hello,

The database upgrade itself is not that much different in a cluster environment than in a "classical" set up.

You usually have to stop the SAP application servers ressources, and stop the monitoring of the database ressources in order not to have the database switched during the oracle upgrade.

You then perform the upgrade in a classical way.

That said, due to the cluster, you have to take some extra care as the DB version upgrade can have an impact on the cluster software requirements, and therefore on the OS level ( mainly patches ) requirements. In order for the cluster to work properly with your new DB version, it is somtime required to apply some patches on the cluster software. These may also need some OS patches to be applied. This has to be looked at.

Could you please post your cluster ressources layout and your clustered FS layout also ?

Thx and Best regards,

S.SOUMAH.

[nirmal_konchada]

Hello,

Can you please let me know your cluster setup??

Regards,

Nirmal