Upgrade Cloud Control 12cR4 to 12cR5

em-12cA couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about doing a Cloud Control 12cR5 installationĀ and said I would be testing the upgrade from 12cR4. I’ve now done that.

The upgrade documentation is quite extensive and the prerequisites are going to be different depending on the database and cloud control versions you are starting with, so this is no way a “recommended” way to do the upgrade. Each one will need to be approached on a case-by-case basis. It’s just meant to give a flavour of what you have to do.

Suffice to say, it worked fine for me. šŸ™‚

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12cR4 Production Upgrade

I’ve already written about the 12cR3 to 12cR4 upgrade here. I did a few run through’s at home to practice it and it all seemed good.

Setting The Scene

Just to set the scene, for our production environment we run Cloud Control in a VMware virtual machine, using Oracle Linux 6.5 as the guest OS. With that setup, we can use a simple installation (DB and OMS on the same VM) and use VMware to provide our failover, rather than having to worry about multiple OMS installations and any DB failover technology etc. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Cloud Control, it’s Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS)! As far as our managed servers go, most of ourĀ databases and all our middle tier stuff runs on VMware and Oracle Linux too. We have a handful of things still hanging around on HP-UX and Solaris, which will hopefully be migrated soon…

Upgrade Attempt 1 : Non-Starter

Yesterday I started the upgrade of our production system. Pretty much straight out of the blocks I hit a road block. It didn’t like the agents running on our HP-UX servers. The upgrades of the HP-UX agents are so painful. Every time so far I’ve had to reinstall them. As a result, I didn’t bother to upgrade them last time and kept running with the previous version of the agents. The upgrade wouldn’t have anything to do with that, so I forgot about the Cloud Control upgrade and I spent yesterday attempting to upgrade the HP-UX agents to 12cR3, before I could attempt the 12cR4 Cloud Control upgrade.

As usual, the upgrade of the agents on HP-UX involved me uninstalling, removing all the targets, installing, discovering all the targets and setting up the backups etc. Not all of it is scripted yet, so it is an annoying and painful process. I’m not sure if other HP-UX users suffer this, but it seems pretty consistently bad for us.Ā The sooner we get rid of these straggling HP-UX servers the better!

So this wasn’t so much a failure of the upgrade. It was really down to me being lazy and not bothering to upgrade some agents.

Fast forward to this morning and I was actually ready to start the upgrade. šŸ™‚

Upgrade Attempt 2 : Success

With the 12cR3 agents in place on HP-UX, the upgrade ran past that step with no problems and on to the main body of the installation. The install and upgrade were textbook.

I’ve upgraded the agent on the cloud control server, but I’m not going to upgrade any of the other agents until I know things are working fine.

Happy days!

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 4 (12cR4) Articles

I’ve started to play around with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12R4. The clean installations on Oracle Linux 5 and Oracle Linux 6 were really easy. You can see how I did them here.

I used 11.2.0.4 as the database repository. I’ll probably have a go with a 12c database in future, which is now supported, but my main focus this time was to check out something similar to what I have at work. Forgive my caution, but I’ll not be using 12c database for my EM repository for a while yet. Cloud Control is too important to risk…

I wasn’t going to bother with anĀ upgrade article becauseĀ Ā wrote a good blog post about the upgrade here. Whilst going through the upgrade, there were a few things I needed to make extra notes on, since I have an terrible memory, soĀ it ended up as a separate article.

Ultimately, you are going to need to read the upgrade docs because there are lots of caveats to think about, depending on what options you use.

Previous upgrades at work were a pain, but we had aĀ more complicated installation with multiple management servers and a separate database. More recently we switched to running a simple configuration (DB and OMS on the same server) on an Oracle Linux VM. That makes doing a trial run of the upgrade at home a more realistic test. Whether it’s an improved Cloud Control upgrade process or the fact thisĀ isĀ a single machine setup, the upgradeĀ was really easy. Now that I’ve practiced the upgrade at home, I’m feeling relatively confident doing the upgrade in production. I’ll probably leave it until I get back from Bulgaria (BGOUG). It’s not really fair to change everything and then leave the country… šŸ™‚

Cheers

Tim…