Out-of-place patching is a feature of RA 23.1 (Jan 2025 PSU) for racli update appliance and racli alter appliance to reduce the downtime required to patch the Recovery Appliance when an update is required. This handles patch steps that do not require the Recovery Appliance to be offline, such as creation of new DB and grid home directories. It requires the directory path to where the gold images for both the DB and GI are stored. Using gold images makes the patch process more consistent and manageable.

The prerequisite for installing update software on the Recovery Appliance is obtaining from Oracle the appropriate update file. This update file is named <ZIP_NAME_HERE> in the example below but typically has specific version information in the name.

These steps need to be run as an admin or root user.

1. Stage the software release by copying the update file (<ZIP_NAME_HERE>) to the first compute node of the Recovery Appliance in the /raacfs/raadmin/tmp/ directory.

   scp <ZIP_NAME_HERE> <USER>@firstnode:/raacfs/raadmin/tmp/

2. Stage the Gold image zip files in the /radump/ directory.

   scp <GI GOLD IMAGE> <DB GOLD IMAGE> <USER>@firstnode:/radump/

3. Run the following pre-installation command.

   <USER>@firstnode # racli run preinstall 
   --zdlra_release_file=/raacfs/raadmin/tmp/<ZIP_NAME_HERE>

   Pay attention to any validations that failed , because they may indicate that the Recovery Appliance is not in an appropriate state to continue.

4. Run racli alter appliance to have it complete any out-of-place operations that it can without downtime.

   <USER>@firstnode # racli alter appliance
   [--online updates] --gold_images_path=/radump

5. Run racli update appliance

   <USER>@firstnode # racli update appliance [--ignore_incidents]

   Note:

   If the update fails in the middle and after the identified error is corrected, this command can be rerun and it will continue with the step that failed.

   This command replaces racli patch appliance and racli upgrade appliance and determines whether the update should be a patch or an upgrade. It performs all the prechecks. If the prechecks pass, it proceeds with the patch or upgrade steps.

6. Validate the ZDLRA version that was installed on the Recovery Appliance.

   <USER>@firstnode # racli version
   

7. Validate the ZDLRA services are online.

   <USER>@firstnode # racli status appliance
   

8. Validate the health of the Recovery Appliance.

   <USER>@firstnode # racli run check --all