If you have custom packages with different architectures installed on database servers, you may see a similar problem as that described in Troubleshooting a Failing Prerequisite Check Due to Dependency Problems on Exadata Database Server. This typically happens when i686 packages are installed on an Exadata database server.

Typically Exadata-branded x86_64 bit rpms are updated in an Exadata update. However, when you have installed similar packages of non-x86_64 bit architecture, the update utility cannot update the 64-bit packages. You would see the following error in the log file:

--> Finished Dependency Resolution
    Error:  Multilib version problems found. This often means that the root
           cause is something else and multilib version checking is just
           pointing out that there is a problem. Eg.:
           
             1. You have an upgrade for libuuid which is missing some
                dependency that another package requires. Yum is trying to
                solve this by installing an older version of libuuid of the
                different architecture. If you exclude the bad architecture
                yum will tell you what the root cause is (which package
                requires what). You can try redoing the upgrade with
                --exclude libuuid.otherarch ... this should give you an error
                message showing the root cause of the problem.
           
             2. You have multiple architectures of libuuid installed, but
                yum can only see an upgrade for one of those arcitectures.
                If you don't want/need both architectures anymore then you
                can remove the one with the missing update and everything
                will work.
           
             3. You have duplicate versions of libuuid installed already.
                You can use "yum check" to get yum show these errors.
           
           ...you can also use --setopt=protected_multilib=false to remove
           this checking, however this is almost never the correct thing to
           do as something else is very likely to go wrong (often causing
           much more problems).
           
           Protected multilib versions: libuuid-2.17.2-12.24.0.1.el6.x86_64 != libuuid-2.17.2-12.18.0.1.el6.i686

The solution for multilib problems is to remove the i686 or i386 package by running rpm –e <package_name.i686>.