Oracle Database Appliance – Deployment Steps

The installation (deployment) of an Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is done by the ODA configuration manager. After you filled out all the information in the various screens (or you have loaded a parameter file and clicked next on all the subsequent screens) after you click the “install” button, the deployment progress is started which consists of 25 steps. Each step executes some scripts and you can see the status of each of the 25 steps in the configuration manager progress screen. You can click the “detail” button to see logging information (what you see is the logfile that you can find in /opt/oracle/oak/onecmd/tmp and with a name that starts with STEPS-…) and what the steps is actually doing and more important what went wrong when the status of a step is set to “failed”.

In this post I’ve created a table with all the steps that are executed during the deployment and the durtion of each step (could be a little different when different things are selected, but I guess the timing is the same for most deployments). In an update of this post I will give a more detailed description what exactly is done in each step, but for now I think the names of the steps tell you what is done.

Whenever a steps fails, the ODA configuration manager stops (it won’t continue and there is NO retry button). When you click the “details” button you can see the logging and probably tell why the steps went wrong. You have to fix the problem before you can continue. One of the great things about the deployment of the ODA is that you can continue where the deployment failed after you have fixed the problem. Unfortunately you can’t use the ODA configuration manager anymore, but there is a script named GridInst.pl that can be found in the /opt/oracle/oak/onecmd directory. You specify which steps it has todo by using ./GridInst.pl -r -24 it will (re)start the deployment processes with the failed step. This works great and it will create a new (with another name) logfile in /opt/oracle/oak/onecmd/tmp starting with STEPS-….
The GridInst.pl script is probably used by the ODA configuration manager in the background.

Step (#) Name Duration (seconds)
0 ValidateParamFile 1
1 SetupNetwork 66
2 WriteNodelists 0
3 SetupSSHroot 37
4 SetupDNS 1
5 UpdateEtcHosts 4
6 SetTimezone 3
7 SetupNTP 2
8 SetupILOM 17
9 CreateUsers 1
10 SetupStorage 323
11 ValidateEnv 5
12 SetupSSHusers 48
13 InstallGIClone 250
14 RunGIClonePl 103
15 RunRootScripts 1264
16 GIConfigAssists 32
17 CreateASMDiskgroups 348
18 InstallDBClone 312
19 RunDBClonePl 143
20 DbcaDB 1675
21 SetupEMDbControl 1257
22 SetupACFS 69
23 SetupASR 0
24 ResecureMachine 7

Summing the duration of all steps it takes around 100 minutes to deploy the ODA. After that you have todo some manual task like
changing passwords etcetera, but after this 100 minutes you will have an Oracle Grid Infrastructure with 2 nodes and a RAC database (if you have choose RAC for the database to install in the ODA configuration manager).