ORACLE 12C RELEASE 2 (12.2.0.1.0) GRID INFRASTRUCTURE UPGRADE

I recently performed an upgrade of an Oracle 12c Release 1 (12.1.0.2) Grid Infrastructure environment hosted on a RAC Virtual Box environment on my laptop to the latest release 12c Release 2 12.2.0.1.0 version.
Here are some points to be noted related to the upgrade process:

• The Grid Infrastructure 12c Release 2 (12.2) software is now available as a single image file for direct download and installation. This greatly simplifies and enables a much quicker installation of the Grid Infrastructure software.

• We just have to extract the image file linuxx64_12201_grid_home.zip into an empty directory where we want the Grid home to be located.

• Once the software has been extracted we have to run the gridSetup.sh script which will launch the installer where we can perform both an initial install as well as an upgrade.

• We need to have about 33 GB of free disk space in the ASM disk groups for the upgrade process.

• The mount point which hosts the Grid Infrastructure home needs to have at least 12 GB of free disk space.

• It is now mandatory to store the Oracle Clusterware files like the Cluster Registry (OCR) and Voting Disks on ASM and we cannot locate these files now on any kind of other shared storage system.

• We have to install a mandatory patch 21255373 to the Grid Infrastructure software home.  We will see that in this case a number of prerequisite checks have failed related to memory (now needs 8 GB minimum RAM on each node ) as well as other checks related to swap size, NTP and resolv.conf – since this is test Virtual Box environment we can ignore those and continue with the upgrade – however we cannot ignore the mandatory patch 21255373 which needs to be applied to the existing 12.1.0.2 Grid Infrastructure home.

• In order to install the patch, we have to also download the opatch patch 6880880 for Oracle 12.2.0.1.0 (opatch 12.2.0.1.8).

• When we run opatchauto to apply the patch 21255373, we get an error java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date.  This is because time zone TZ entry AWST (Australian Western Standard Time)  is added into $ORACLE_HOME/inventory/ContentsXML/comps.xml and the opatch is using $ORACLE_HOME/jdk/jre, which is version 1.6. Java 1.6 is not able read the TZ entry AWST. We can ignore the error and continue with  the patch application – but after the patch has been applied, we have to change all the occurrences of string “AWST” in the comps.xml file to “WST” – otherwise even though we have applied the patch, the command opatch lsinventory will not show that the patch has been applied until the date format string in the comps.xml is changed as mentioned earlier.
  

• Upgrade failed at 46% in the phase Execute Root Scripts. Ran the command crsctl stop crs -f as root on each node and clicked on the Retry button and the upgrade then continued without any error

• At the end of the upgrade, the Cluster Verification Utility fails because it checks for NTP configuration appropriate for an Oracle RAC environment. NTP is not configured on this Virtual Box environment so we can ignore the error

Here are some screen shots captured while the 12c Release 2 Grid Infrastructure upgrade was in progress…..










































































Note:
Change all occurrences of “AWST” to “WST” in comps.xml file




Now opatch lsinventory command will show that the patch 21255373 has been applied.