Manage Exadata Infrastructure Maintenance

Oracle schedules and performs all patching and other maintenance operations on all the infrastructure resources of an Autonomous AI Database. At the same time, it also provides you with various options to customize, view, and reschedule maintenance events for the different infrastructure resources, including Exadata Infrastructure resources.

View and Manage Scheduled Maintenance of an Exadata Infrastructure Resource

You view and manage scheduled maintenance of an Exadata Infrastructure resource from its Details page.

Required IAM Policies

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use exadata-infrastructures

Oracle performs periodic maintenance on your Exadata infrastructure to ensure it is free of potential issues that could affect database availability, integrity, and security. Updating the software running on the infrastructure with the latest product and security fixes protects your data and the overall compliance of the Oracle Cloud. These updates are performed in an automated way and include all the best practices, relieving you of the need to invest any effort in maintaining your infrastructure. Oracle updates include the physical database server hosts, storage servers, network fabric switches, management switches, power distribution units (PDUs), integrated lights-out management (ILOM) interfaces, and control plane servers.

Oracle performs two types of infrastructure maintenance:

• Quarterly maintenance is applied every three months and can include product fixes, enhancements, and security fixes.
• Monthly maintenance only applies critical security fixes that can be applied online to ensure components are maintained at the highest security standards with any security vulnerabilities fixed as soon as possible.

Quarterly Maintenance

Oracle minimizes the impact of quarterly maintenance on your applications using rolling maintenance operations, preserving database availability throughout the update process. Rolling maintenance reboots each database server, one at a time, with at most one server offline at any time. Applications designed for high availability automatically and transparently migrate their database connections between available database instances without disruption, eliminating the need for scheduling downtime. Storage server updates are also applied in a rolling manner. Rebooting storage servers has no effect on the database service, and thus has no impact on your applications.

Oracle allows you to fully control quarterly maintenance schedules, so you can schedule maintenance during a period which will have the least impact on your business users. You have full control and visibility over when quarterly maintenance will be applied, even allowing you to schedule the maintenance across multiple maintenance windows. Scheduling is simplified using a Maintenance Scheduling Policy, which aims to standardize scheduling across the fleet to ensure consistency and efficiency. By defining the policy once and applying it to multiple resources, it streamlines the scheduling process. You may also reschedule maintenance should unexpected business issues occur.

Monthly Security Maintenance

Monthly security maintenance is performed on the database servers online, with no reboot, and no impact to your applications. Monthly updates are applied to storage servers in a rolling manner, also with no impact to your applications.

Monthly security maintenance can also be scheduled at a specific time during the month, albeit in a single maintenance window. Oracle will publish a schedule for monthly maintenance at least one week prior to start of the maintenance period, and you can reschedule if required.

Oracle performs patches and updates to all of the Oracle-managed system components on Exadata Cloud Infrastructure.

• Overview of Quarterly Infrastructure Maintenance - By default, infrastructure maintenance updates the Exadata database server hosts in a rolling fashion, followed by updating the storage servers.
• Overview of Monthly Security Maintenance - Security maintenance, performed alongside the quarterly maintenance, is executed in months when important security updates are needed and includes fixes for vulnerabilities across all CVSS scores.
• Understanding Monthly and Quarterly Maintenance in the Same Month

Maintenance Scheduling Policy

Learn how to use the OCI Console to configure and manage maintenance scheduling policies.

The Maintenance Scheduling Policy standardizes scheduling across the fleet, ensuring consistency and efficiency. By defining a single policy and applying it to multiple resources, it streamlines the scheduling process and aligns maintenance activities with business best practices.

Serving as a central repository, the policy documents and coordinates maintenance commitments with stakeholders, improving compliance and operational efficiency. Its centralized management ensures adherence to compliance requirements while allowing efficient coordination of changes from a single point of control. Additionally, the policy enhances communication about planned maintenance across environments in the fleet, fostering better coordination and awareness.

If a maintenance scheduling policy is used, all the scheduling preferences for the infrastructure maintenance are derived from the policy. Any preference defined within the infrastructure is not valid while the policy is in use.

Using the Console to Configure Oracle-Managed Infrastructure Updates

Full Exadata infrastructure software updates are scheduled on a quarterly basis. In addition, important security updates are scheduled monthly. While you cannot opt-out of these infrastructure updates, Oracle alerts you in advance through the Cloud Notification Portal and allows scheduling flexibility to help you plan for them.

For quarterly infrastructure maintenance, you can set a maintenance window to determine when the maintenance will begin. You can also edit the maintenance method, enable custom action, and view the scheduled maintenance runs and the maintenance history of your Exadata Cloud@Customer in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console. For security maintenance, you may edit the scheduled start time within the 21-day window.

Manage Quarterly/Monthly Maintenance Run Created From Scheduling Plan