Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 19c, the Oracle Grid Infrastructure installation wizard (gridSetup.sh) enables you to perform a dry-run mode upgrade to check your system’s upgrade readiness.

In dry-run upgrade mode, the installation wizard performs all of the system readiness checks that it would perform in an actual upgrade and enables you to verify whether your system is ready for upgrade before you start the upgrade. This mode does not perform an actual upgrade. It helps anticipate potential problems with the system setup and avoid upgrade failures.

Given that +ASM1 has dg1 mounted but not dg2, and +ASM2 has dg2 mounted but not dg1, the Multiple ASMB project allows for the Database to use both dg1 and dg2 by connecting to both ASM instances simultaneously. Instead of having just ASMB, we can now have ASMBn.

This feature increases the availability of the Real Application Clusters (RAC) stack by allowing DB to use multiple disk groups even if a given ASM instance happens not to have all of them mounted.

You cannot use parity protection for write-once files in Oracle Database Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM). Write-once files are files such archive logs and backup sets.

A great deal of space is consumed when two or three way Oracle ASM mirroring is used for files associated with database backup operations. Backup files are write-once files, and this feature allows parity protection for protection rather than conventional mirroring. Considerable space savings are the result.

Secure Cluster Communication protects the cluster interconnect from common security threats when used together with Single Network Support. Secure Cluster Communication includes message digest mechanisms, protection against fuzzing, and uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) to provide privacy and data integrity between the cluster members.

The increased security for the cluster interconnect is invoked automatically as part of a new Oracle Grid Infrastructure 19c deployment or an upgrade to Oracle Grid Infrastructure 19c. Database administrators or cluster administrators do not need to make any configuration changes for this feature.

Zero-Downtime Oracle Grid Infrastructure Patching enables patching of Oracle Grid Infrastructure without interrupting database operations. Patches are applied out-of-place and in a rolling fashion, with one node being patched at a time, while the database instances on the node remain operational. Zero-Downtime Oracle Grid Infrastructure Patching supports Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) databases on clusters with two or more nodes.

Zero-Downtime Grid Infrastructure Patching significantly increases database availability by allowing customers to perform a rolling patch of Oracle Grid Infrastructure without interrupting database operations on the node being patched and without impacting capacity or performance on those database instances.

Zero-Downtime Oracle Grid Infrastructure Patching enables the application of one-off Oracle Grid Infrastructure patches without impacting the Oracle RAC database instances. Use Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning (Oracle FPP) to apply patches in a rolling fashion across the cluster. This functionality is available for all Oracle Real Application Clusters with two or more nodes, but currently applies only to one-off patches (not the RU's and RUR's).

Using Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning to apply one-off Oracle Grid Infrastructure patches with zero database instance downtime reduces the impact on users and interruptions of service from the Oracle RAC database instances to nil. With prior database releases, you must shut down the database instance before applying an Oracle Grid Infrastructure patch, clearly impacting enterprise operations.

Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 19c, the desupport for direct OCR and voting disk file placement on shared file systems is rescinded for Oracle Standalone Clusters. For Oracle Domain Services Clusters the requirement to place OCR and voting files in Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) on top of files hosted on shared file systems and used as ASM disks remains.

In Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c Release 2 (12.2), Oracle announced that it would no longer support the placement of the Oracle Grid Infrastructure Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) and voting files directly on a shared file system. This desupport is now rescinded. Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 19c (19.3), with Oracle Standalone Clusters, you can again place OCR and voting disk files directly on shared file systems.

Starting with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 19c, the Grid Infrastructure Management Repository (GIMR) is optional for new installations of Oracle Standalone Cluster. Oracle Domain Services Clusters still require the installation of a GIMR as a service component.

The data contained in the GIMR is the basis for preventative diagnostics based on applied Machine Learning and can help to increase the availability of Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) databases. Having an optional installation for the GIMR allows for more flexible storage space management and faster deployment, especially during the installation of test and development systems.