1. Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Administrator's Guide
  2. Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Overview
  3. About Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning

About Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning (FPP) is a service in Oracle Grid Infrastructure.

Note:

  • Oracle does not support Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning on HP-UX or Windows operating systems.

  • The Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server does not manage operating system images.

You can use Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning in either of the following modes:

  • As a central server (Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server), that stores and manages standardized images, called gold images. You can deploy gold images to any number of nodes across a data center. You can use the deployed homes to create new clusters and databases, and patch, upgrade, and scale existing installations.

    The server manages software homes on the cluster hosting the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server, itself, Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Clients, and can also manage installations running Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11g release 2 (11.2.0.3 and 11.2.0.4), 12c release 1 (12.1.0.2), and later releases. The server can also manage installations running no grid infrastructure.

    An Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server can provision new installations and can manage existing installations without any changes to the existing installations (such as no agent, daemon, or configuration prerequisites). Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Servers also include capabilities for automatically sharing gold images among peer Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Servers to support enterprises with geographically distributed data centers.

  • As a client (Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Client), that can be managed from the central Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server or directly by running commands on the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Client, itself. As with the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server, the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Client is a service built in to Oracle Grid Infrastructure and is available with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 12c release 2 (12.2.0.1), and later. The Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Client service can retrieve gold images from the Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server, upload new images based on policy, and apply maintenance operations to itself.

For patching operations, a third option is available with Oracle Database and Oracle Grid Infrastructure 18c, and later. The procedures for updating database and grid infrastructure homes have been modularized into independent automatons that are included with Oracle Database and Oracle Grid Infrastructure, and can be run locally without any central Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Server in the architecture. This provides an immediate entry point to the capabilities of Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning as soon as you bring up an Oracle Database or cluster.

Note:

Combined Oracle FPP patching for Oracle Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Database is not supported for standalone configurations.

Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Advantages

Deploying Oracle software using Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning has the following advantages:

  • Ensures standardization and enables high degrees of automation with gold images and managed lineage of deployed software.

  • Minimizes downtime by deploying new homes as images (working copies of gold images) out-of-place, without disrupting active databases or clusters.

  • Simplifies local maintenance operations by providing automatons which are invoked with a simple, consistent API across database versions and deployment models.

  • Reduces maintenance risk with built-in validations and a dry run mode to test the operations.

  • Enables you to resume or restart the commands in the event of an unforeseen issue, reducing the impact of maintenance operations.

  • Minimizes and often eliminates the impact of patching and upgrades, with features that include:
    • Zero-downtime database upgrade with fully automated upgrade, executed entirely within the deployment without requiring any extra nodes or external storage.
    • Adaptive management of database sessions and OJVM during rolling patching.
    • Options for management of consolidated deployments.

  • The deployment and maintenance operations enable customizations to include environment-specific actions into the automated workflow.

Parent topic: Oracle Fleet Patching and Provisioning Overview