An Oracle Database Appliance has its own inventory to keep track of all installed firmware and software component versions and patches. ODA patches are released in the form of patch bundles. ODA patch bundles can contain patches for:
- System Firmware
- Operating System
- Oracle Grid Infrastructure
- Oracle Database
- Oracle Appliance Manager
The Oracle Database Appliance inventory in fact is a xml file (/opt/oracle/oak/pkgrepos/System/system_repos_metadata.xml) containing an entry for every ODA “component” that is updatables through patches or firmware upgrades like: disks (local and shared), ILO, BIOS, operating system, Oracle software, etc.
As of version 2.1.0.1.0 running oakcli show version -detail doesn’t only the parse metadata/inventory file, but also actually scans the system hardware to determine the installed firmware (using the command /usr/sbin/fwupdate list all). This is why running the oakcli show version command takes a lot longer than that it took in version 2.1.0.0..
Each ODA patch bundle is identified with a number. The base release for the ODA has version number 2.1.0.0.0. For each installed patch bundle a directory (which has the version number as its name) is created under /opt/oracle/oak/pkgrepos/System. This directory in its turn contains a directory named conf and contains a couple of files describing the content of the patch bundle (for the base release 2.1.0.0.0 /opt/oracle/oak/pkgrepos/System/2.1.0.0.0/conf):
- EndUserImage.xml (not available in patch bundles and only on ODA node 1 (SC0))
Oracle Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Database software - FactoryImage.xml (not available in patch bundles)
Available patches and firmware
- PatchImage.xml
Available patches and firmware - patch_metadata.txt
This file contains the physical location of the patches (files)