The Patch Deployment feature in EM12c can greatly help in automating the rolling out of patches when we have to deploy the patch on a large number of targets – this significantly reduces both the time and complexity involved in the process.
Let us look at an example of deploying the JAN 2015 PSU patch using EM12c.
We first need to upload the JAN 2015 PSU patch 19769480 as well as the opatch version 12.1.0.1.6 to the EM12c Software Library – as we are operating in Offline Patching mode.
Note that we have to upload the Patch Metadata file as well along with the patch
Click on 19769480 link in the Patch Name column
We will add the patch to a New Patch Plan
We can deploy the PSU patch on all available hosts with 12.1.0.2 Oracle databases – in this example we are deploying the PSU to just a single host.
After the patch plan has been created we edit the patch plan via the Patches & Updates menu
The Patch deployment can be In Place or Out of Place. In this case we will be applying the PSU patch to the existing Oracle Home. Provide the required Normal and Privileged Credentials and validate the same.
We then need to run an Analyze of the PSU patch. The patch is staged and checks are performed to determine if all the patch prerequisites are met.
After the patch has been successfully analyzed, we can see that it is now ready for deployment.
Review the patch plan and then click on the Deploy button
Since the PSU patch deployment will require a database outage we can schedule the patch to be deployed at a specfic time or it can be deployed to start immediately.
While the patch deployment is in progress we can view the different actions being performed at each step and have very good visibility of the patch application as it proceeds.
After the PSU patch application we can now see that the Post SQL script is being applied while the database has been started in Upgrade Mode.
A Blackout is created automatically as patch of the patch deployment and Blackout is cleared as one of the last steps in the patch deployment plan.
If we select the relevant 12.1.0.2 Oracle Home in the Targets menu, we can see under the Patches Applied tab that patch 19769480 has been successfully applied and we also can see the various bugs which have been fixed by this PSU patch.
