Last Friday, we had a new patch cycle scheduled to upgrade the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X9-2 from Patch level M3.9 to M3.10 (3.0.2-b1325160). For the first time, we encountered zero issues! All patching steps, including ZFSSA, compute nodes, platform, and OCI images, ran smoothly. For this patch, 37635338: PCA Release 3.0.2-b1325160 Patch (also known as M3.10), the following components were affected according to the ISO and patch readme: Release Notes Oracle provides release notes that highlight new features for each version, but they lack detailed information. Here is an overview of the latest features from the documentation: Latest Features Improved Upgrade and Patching Procedures Both the Upgrade Guide and Patching Guide have been restructured to make it easier and…
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Making the Most of an Oracle Database Appliance X7-2S Without a CSI
A few months ago I came into possession of two Oracle Database Appliance X7-2S. How did that happen? A migration project that I was assisting with was completely cancelled due to the takeover of the company and the new organization had no interest in Oracle hardware and software. They kindly gave me the two machines free of charge. Here they are: Both ODAs have no valid Customer Support Identifier (CSI), there is no current contract. We all know that without a CSI there is no support and therefore no Oracle software. As far as I know, there is no license clause that allows the operation of Oracle hardware and software without a license, even if only for training purposes (if…
Read MorePCA X9-2 – How To: IPMItool Access to Management and Compute Nodes
In a project actually we are looking for several methods how to monitor the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance hardware stack. There are some metrics who are gathered in the Grafana environment like memory and CPU usage, but we are not able to recognize when a compute or management node has a hardware failure. Some of the hardware events are visible in the Service Enclave User Interface, but there is still no mechanism at work to get an alert. And as there is still no EM13c plugin available for the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X9-2 (no clue if this ever will released as it worked for X8), we need another solution to get informed. IPMItool The ipmitool is a powerful command-line…
Read MorePCA X9-2 – Update 3.0.2-M3.7.1 (302-b1010555) kills your Grafana SMTP Settings
Following the recent PCA upgrade from 3.0.2-M3.5 to 3.0.2-M3.7.1, we encountered an issue where Grafana was unable to send alerts as intended. Since Grafana plays a crucial role in monitoring aspects such as the health state of ZFSSA, restoring this functionality became important. Upon raising a service request (SR), it was identified as a bug that is planned for resolution in version 3.0.2-M3.9, according to support. Therefore, if version 3.0.2-M3.8 is released in the future, we’ll need to verifay the situation again. Previously, there was a MOS note detailing the configuration of SMTP for the earlier software release, identified by Doc ID 2964429.1. Unfortunately, this document is currently unavailable. I am hopeful that it will be updated in the near…
Read MorePCA X9-2 – How To: Storage Expansion with High Performance Storage DE3-24P
Situation The Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X9-2 was delivered at the end 2022 with high capacity storage. For the Oracle PCA X9-2, there are two distinct storage types available, differentiated by their disk characteristics such as type, size, and whether they are HDDs or SSDs. The standard block size for a Block Volume in this system is set at 8k. However, if your specific workload requires a different block size, you can customize the Block Volume at the time of its creation using the tag ‘PCA_blocksize’ (this aspect will be explored in a separate test). The disk shelves within the system are interconnected using dual 100Gb interfaces. Two variants are available: High Capacity – DE3-24C High Performance – DE3-24P…
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