Clone Oracle Home
Clone Oracle Home
Clone Oracle Home
Note that the steps and commands in this section pertain to Oracle10g homes only.
1. Make the initial Oracle home gold copy. Download the appropriate Oracle
database product, launch the Oracle Universal Installer, and create an Oracle
home. Do not create a database. This Oracle home is the original gold copy
version. It is only used for patching and upgrading.
2. Apply all appropriate patches to initial Oracle home gold copy.
To clone or make a new variation of the Oracle home gold copy, perform the following:
a) Navigate to the gold copy Oracle home parent directory. In our case we will
call this directory /u01/app/oracle/clones. This directory contains the gold
Oracle homes. The example gold Oracle home is called 10.2.0.2.jan07.
cd /u01/app/oracle/clones
b) Make a CPIO archive of the target gold Oracle home. Again, the target is a
directory called 10.2.0.2.jan07. Replace this gold Oracle home directory
reference with yours. The below CPIO command makes a CPIO file of the
10.2.0.2.jan07 Oracle home.
1. Create a compressed CPIO archive of the Oracle home gold copy (Steps A and B
above)
2. FTP the compressed CPIO archive to the new server. Place the file in the Oracle
homes parent directory (i.e. /u01/app/oracle/product).
5. At this point, the cloned Oracle home is ready to support a database. You can
install a new database for the Oracle home by running Oracle Database
Configuration Agent or point an existing database to the new Oracle home. The
following steps can be used to point an existing database to the new Oracle home.
a. Modify the environment file (inst.ksh) so that the environment will point to the
new Oracle home.
b. Modify the listener file (listener.ora) to point to the new Oracle home.
d. Shutdown the database. Change the environment to the new Oracle home and
reload the listener.
e. Move the old database’s pfile/spfile to the location used by the new Oracle
home.
In this article I discussed the benefits of using a gold copy Oracle home and cloning in
place of patching an Oracle home in place. You will find that this practice reduces the
patching complexities, risk, and time. Using a cloned gold copy will also result in less
outage time. Cloning can be done through Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control. If
this tool is unavailable, the article describes a set of simple commands that will enable
you to create and deploy cloned Oracle homes. I believe that employment of the
techniques discussed in this article will make you life as a DBA easier.