20 Patching Using My Oracle Support

From Patch Recommendations

Patch recommendations are proactive notifications of potential system issues and recommendations that help you improve system performance and avert outages. My Oracle Support's Patch Recommendations region provides a portal to all recommended patches. From the bar graph, you can drill down to a list of recommended patch, view details about those patches, download the patches, or add them to a patch plan. A bar graph summarizes the number of issues found (one issue = one recommendation for one target). The Recommended Patches region appears by default on the Patch and Updates page and can also be added to the Dashboard. You can edit this region to filter its contents.

1. From the Oracle Enterprise Manager console, go to the My Oracle Support tab and select Patches & Updates.

   
   

2. From the Patch Recommendations region you can change the display either by classification or by target type. To view recommended patches, click on the bar graph pertaining to the desired patches, or click All Recommendations to display all recommendations in the Patch Recommendation page. The page displays all the recommendations currently available for the Enterprise Manager targets.
   

   The Patch Recommendations are determined from within Enterprise Manager by directly downloading the metadata XML from My Oracle Support. User environments that are OFFLINE or DISCONNECTED can download the XML and upload to Grid Control to compute recommendations in offline mode.

3. To display information about a patch, select a patch and click 'Full Screen' on the action menu drop down.

   
   

   Comprehensive patch-related information such as Patch attributes, bugs fixed, related Knowledge articles are displayed.

   
   

   You can also obtain information regarding patch popularity with the number of downloads and also view the trend of downloads. Additionally, you can view and comment on reviews made by other members of the community.

   Note:

   patch information (such as popularity, trending, member reviews) is only available for non-Security patches.

   From this page, you can add the patch to the Patch Plan.

4. Click Add to Plan and select Add to New... if you want to add the patch to a new Patch Plan, or Add to Existing to the patch to an existing Plan.
   

   When creating a new Patch Plan, you must provide a unique name to the Plan.

5. Click Create Plan.

   My Oracle Support displays a verification message.

   
   

   Click View Plan to open the Create Plan wizard and shows the selected patch under the patches section.

   
   

By Monitoring Service Requests and Selectively Adding Patches

My Oracle Support integration with Enterprise Manager provides convenient access to Service Requests and Knowledge articles. This allows you to carry out typical actions of rollouts by accumulating patches and effectively scheduling the rollout during the a designated maintenance window.

Enterprise Manager/My Oracle Support integration makes it easy to address this situation by allowing you to:

• Create / Update / Track Service Requests and immediately associate patches with a Patch Plan and automate deployment to resolve issues.

• Browse through Knowledge Articles providing relevant information about issues relating to problems fixed by the patch.

Example Situation

An issue is reported by a customer with an Oracle E- Business Suite 11i installation. Oracle Support verifies the customer's configuration information, made available through Oracle Configuration Manager, and promptly determines that the issue relates to the ORA-600 error on the underlying Database. As a resolution, Oracle Support recommends that a patch be applied. The lead database administrator for the customer recommends applying the patch as a part of the upcoming June rollout cycle.

1. From the My Oracle Support tab, click Service Requests.
   

   You can conveniently access closely monitored Service Requests by clicking the star icon associated with a particular SR.

   
   

2. To view the most recent updates to a Service Request (as might be made by Oracle Support), click on the SR's Problem Summary. Comprehensive information about that SR is displayed.

3. To view the most recent updates to the SR, see the History region. This region logs all SR activity, including any patches recommended by Oracle Support.

   
   

4. To view specific patch information, click on the specific patch link in the History table. Comprehensive information about the selected patch is displayed.

   
   

   From this page, you have access to a explicit patch information such as customer download trends and Community Reviews that provide useful information about patch issues and resolutions from other customers.

5. When ready, you can add the patch to your Patch Plan by clicking Add to Plan and then selecting Add to Existing if you are adding the patch to an existing Plan, or Add to New... if you are creating an entirely new Patch Plan. For the sake of procedural flow, we will assume that you already have a Patch Plan and that you have selected the Add to Existing option. The Add to Plan window appears.

   
   

   You are now ready to associate a target with the patch.

6. In the Add to Plan window, choose a target. You can also search for a specific target if you do not know the target name.

7. Once you have associated the desired targets with the patch, you are now ready to add the patch to the Patch Plan. Click Add Patch to Plan.

By Searching for Specific Patches

The most common method for finding patches to be added to a Patch Plan is by simply searching for them. My Oracle Support's advanced patch search functionality allows you to perform more flexible and advanced searches. It also provides capabilities such as saving a search that's used routinely, and searching based on existing 'saved' searches. All of this lets you perform searches more quickly and efficiently.

Typical patch search scenarios would be where a DBA learns the existence of a patch from external sources such as blogs, Oracle technology forums, or from colleagues. My Oracle Support patch search and download functionality is tightly integrated with Patch Plan creation/update functionality. The DBA can now search and add the patches directly to the Patch Plan for further Validation in preparation for rollout, thus creating a seamless workflow.

1. From the My Oracle Support tab, click Patches & Updates.

   
   

2. From the Patch Search region, enter the search parameters you want to use and click Search.

   Alternatively, you can search using any previously save searches. My Oracle Support search functionality maintains a list of the most recent searches. If you know that you recently performed an identical (or similar) search, you can access the list of searches on the Recent tab of the Patch Search region.

3. Once the patch search is complete, the search results are displayed in the Patch Search Results region.

   
   

4. Select one or more patches and click Add to Plan from the context menu and choose either to add them to a new plan or to an existing plan.

   
   

   For the sake of task flow, we will assume you are adding the patches) to an existing Patch Plan.

5. From the Add to Plan dialog, associate the patch with the intended target.Click Add Patch to Plan. My Oracle Support will display a message verifying that the patch has been added to a Patch Plan.
   

6. Click View Plan to access the Patch Plan wizard. All patches accumulated through searches, Oracle Support Recommendations, and/or Service Requests for a specific rollout will be displayed

Resolving Patch Conflicts

Ultimately, when attempting to accumulate patches to rollout to heterogeneous IT environments, conflicts may arise between patches that are the result of such issues as version incompatibility between patches, or perhaps incompatibility with existing host software. My Oracle Support simplifies and automates patch conflict resolution.

As covered previously, the Patch Plan wizard allows you to view or modify any aspect of the Patch Plan.

The most important function of the wizard is to validate the Patch Plan. When My Oracle Support validates a plan, it checks for conflicts using patch information from Oracle, the inventory of patches on your system (gathered by the Configuration Manager) and information from the candidate patches. In addition to checking patch merge conflicts between patches listed in the plan, the validation function also checks for conflicts between the listed plan patches and patches that have already been applied.

1. From the Patch Plan wizard, click Validation or Next. When new patches are added to an existing Patch Plan, click Revalidate.
   

   When validating, a request to check if the selected patch can be applied to targets is sent to My Oracle Support. Upon processing, there are three possible outcomes:

   • There are no conflicts, then the selected patches are “Ready for Deployment”

   • Conflict exists: You can directly file a Merge Request to obtain a conflict free patch. If there is an open request filed by another customer, you will be automatically added to the existin request.

   • Upon Conflicts, if there is a Merge Patch already available, you can directly opt to replace the conflicting patches with the Merge Patch

   For the sake of task flow, we will assume there is a conflict.

2. Upon validation, My Oracle Support finds that there are conflicts between the two patches. Click Request Replacement Patches.

   
   

3. In this situation, a Merge Patch is already available. Click Replace Conflicting Patches.