The first step is to configure Enterprise Manager for getting patch advisory and patches from My Oracle Support site. Patch advisory is a list of suggested patches forMy Oracle Support site. Patch advisory is a list of suggested patches for Oracle Support site. Patch advisory is a list of suggested patches forOracle Support site. Patch advisory is a list of suggested patches for Support site. Patch advisory is a list of suggested patches forSupport site. Patch advisory is a list of suggested patches for site. Patch advisory is a list of suggested patches for all Oracle Products that is published by Oracle periodically. Using this configuration, Enterprise Manager can connect to My Oracle Support site and download theMy Oracle Support site and download the Oracle Support site and download theOracle Support site and download the site and download the
required data. For that configuration, click on the Setup link on the Enterprise
Manager homepage, on the next page click on Patching Setup. On this page, you will need to provide the credentials for My Oracle Support account. Enterprise Manager uses these credentials to authenticate for My Oracle Support and download patches.
The following screenshot shows the page where you can configure these credentials:�
After this setup, Enterprise Manager can periodically connect to My Oracle Support site and download the latest patch advisory. The patch advisory has a list of
recommended patches for all Oracle products, going through the whole list and finding out which patches your datacenter needs, could be time consuming and you could miss out on some of the patches. Enterprise Manager evaluates patch advisory with the inventory of Oracle products in the datacenter and finds out what Oracle products need to be patched.
These details are listed on the Enterprise Manager homepage; the following screenshot shows this data. You can see those details under the Critical Patch Advisories for Oracle Homes section. In this illustration, you see that 15 Oracle Homes need to be patched.
So, now we know that 15 Oracle Homes need to be patched, but you need to find which 15 Oracle Homes and what the Oracle Products are running on those Oracle Homes. To find this out, you need to click on the link next to the Patch advisories and you will see the page as shown next:
This page shows a filtered view of the detailed patch advisory, it shows only the patches applicable to the products that you have in your datacenter. It also shows the number of Oracle Homes where these patches need to be applied. The right-most column in the table provides the link to Oracle Home, where a particular patch needs to be applied. Once you click on that link you will see a page as shown next:
On this page, you see which Oracle Homes need to be patched and the host where these Oracle Homes are installed. You will see many blanks on this page such as Status, Downloaded, Created On, and so on, because so far we have downloaded only patch advisories and not the actual patches.
At this point you know about all the patches that you need to apply to stay up-to-date with the recommendations from Oracle. You also know the Oracle Homes and hosts where these patches are applied. It's time to apply the patches.
Enterprise Manager provides a deployment procedure to apply the patches on Oracle Application Servers, using this, you can apply one or more patches on one or more application server targets. In the next few steps, we'll see how to use that deployment procedure.
To use the Application Server deployment procedure, click on the Deployments tab on the Enterprise Manager homepage. From the Deployments tab, click on the link, Patching through Deployment Procedures, this takes you to a page that lists various deployment procedures. The following screenshot shows such a page:
From this page, select the radio button next to Patch Application Server and click on the Schedule Deployment button on the top of the table. You will see a page as shown next:
On this page you need to provide the staging location where this patch will be staged. The patch will be applied from this staging location. You will need to select the patches you want to apply, to do so click on the Add button under Application Server updates. On the next page, you can choose to use a patch that is already available in the software library or choose a patch from My Oracle Support. In this illustration, we'll go with the My Oracle Support option. The following screenshot shows this page:
On this page, you can enter the details to search the patches that you want to apply.
For this illustration we used a patch number that we got from the patch advisory, Oracle Fusion Middleware as product family, Oracle Application Server as Product and Linux X86 as platform. Once you click on the GO button, Enterprise Manager will search My Oracle Support to get more details on patches that meet search parameters. In this case, the search returns with only one patch. The following screenshot shows the page after performing a search on My Oracle Support:
Once you have made the choice through the Select check box, you can click on the Select button. You will be taken back to the first page of the deployment procedure, and your screen will look like the figure shown next:�
There are a few more things to see before we go to the next step, this page provides an option to upgrade the Opatch. Opatch is a tool provided by Oracle to apply the patches. Enterprise Manager can also upgrade the Opatch as part of patching, if required. You can also choose to blackout the target during patching to avoid unnecessary alerts if the target has to be stopped during patching.
Once you click on Next, you will see Step 2 of this flow where you can add the targets that you want to apply the patches to. The following screenshot shows that page:
On the next few pages, you will be prompted to provide some more details, like host credentials for the hosts where product to be patched are running. You will also be asked to provide a unique name for this patching operation—using that, you can track the status of the operation later on. Once you go through these steps this patching operation will be scheduled, where Enterprise Manager will download the patch from My Oracle Support and will apply that patch on a selected target.
You can keep track of the patching operation from the Deployments tab by clicking on Procedure Completion Status. On this page, you will see the status of all
deployment procedures. The following screenshot shows one such page:
Once the deployment procedure shows success status on the previous screen, your patches are applied to the selected application server.
Summary
In this chapter, we learned how to manage Oracle Application Server targets using Enterprise Manager. The key takeaways from this chapter are:
Enterprise Manager supports management of multiple farms and application server instances
Enterprise Manager provides provisioning support for Oracle Application Servers
Provisioning support for Application Server includes initial provisioning and provisioning from a referenced environment
Using Enterprise Manager, you can monitor the availability and performance of application server components
To monitor an application, you need to monitor all the Application Server components that provide runtime support for application
You can monitor applications using the web transaction test
You can use configuration collections of Oracle Application Server for change tracking and configuration compliance
Enterprise Manager provides patching automation for Oracle Application Server
In this chapter, we covered the management and monitoring of Oracle Application Server. In the next chapter, we will learn about management of Forms and Reports Server and Applications. See you at the next stop!
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