E-Business Suite 11i Upgrade to and A Technical Comparison

Transcription

1 COLLABORATE 2014 OAUG Forum E-Business Suite 11i Upgrade to and A Technical Comparison Biju Thomas, OneNeck IT Solutions Abstract Much awaited 12.2 release of EBS has come. Always there is a question of should I upgrade the 11i instance to or In this session, you will learn the architectural differences between and 12.2, the upgrade step differences and time consumption for each upgrade, options to tune upgrade. Is upgrading database to 12c any better? The objectives to be covered in the 1 hour are: Compare upgrade steps with upgrade from Upgrade time requirement for upgrade vs 12.2 upgrade Lessons learned, fine tuning the upgrade Introduction to EBS R Oracle Corporation announced the general availability of Oracle EBS R at Oracle Open World This is a major leap forward from a technical standpoint for EBS, incorporating Fusion Middleware in the architecture. The GA release announced in Sep 2013 was and within few months, Oracle came out with a major patch release was announced in Dec EBS 12.2 comes with many benefits. The biggest of all is the ability to apply EBS patches without taking large down time windows. The technology stack involves Fusion MW and WebLogic server, which brings a whole new world of performance monitoring options also includes several functional enhancements and reports, comes with a new user interface with table scrolling and other friendly features. If you are on 11i or 12.0, it is time for upgrading the instance to R12. Since and are available options, you have the choice to go either version. When we have options, we have to choose, which usually the hard part is. Let us review some of the major differences from a technical standpoint with going to 12.1 and EBS R12 Compare to Between 11i and R12 there are major functional changes, like Sub Ledger Accounting (SLA) and Multi- Org configuration. Between 11i and 12.1, the technology components are pretty much same, just a newer version. But, between 11i/12.1 and 12.2, the technology architecture is changed by the introduction of Online Patching and Fusion Middle Ware. This poses a higher learning curve for the DBAs by going to COLLABORATE 14 Copyright 2014 by Biju Thomas Page 1

2 Multiple products also changed by going to For example, Oracle Identity Manager SSO is no longer supported; instead you should plan on going to Oracle Access Manager. Similarly Oracle Portal is replaced with Oracle WebCenter Portal. It is strongly recommended to upgrade the database to before the R12 upgrade thus the outage window and risk can be reduced during the application upgrade. To upgrade to 12.2, the database must be at or higher, to be able to use the Edition Based Redefinition (EBR) feature for online patching. Though 11g database (versions 1 and 2) supports case sensitive passwords, Oracle EBS 11i and 12.1 did not support case sensitivity in database passwords. In 12.2, Oracle supports case sensitive database passwords. When you install 11i instance ( ), the default database version is 9.2 and with 12.1 it is With 12.2 the database version is All three versions support newest releases of database, and you must upgrade the database to or and enjoy the new features and performance. The figure below shows the EBS technical stack differences between versions. As you can see under 12.2, Fusion MW 11g and WebLogic Server are part of the architecture. COLLABORATE 14 Copyright 2014 by Biju Thomas Page 2

3 The file system structure is different and improved in each major version. They are designed to facilitate a smoother clone and copy only required files during clone. Table below shows the file location and the common key variables. Variable APPL_TOP <base>/<dbname>appl <base>/apps/apps_st/appl <base>/ebsapps/appl COMMON_TOP <base>/<dbname>comn <base>/apps/apps_st/comn <base>/ebsapps/comn ORACLE_HOME <base>/<dbname>ora/ias <base>/apps/tech_st/ <base>/ebsapps/ (tools) IAS_ORACLE_HOME <base>/<dbname>ora/8.0.6 ORACLE_HOME <base>/apps/tech_st/ $FMW_HOME/wlserver_10.3 (Java) FMW_HOME <base>/fmw_home Product Top $APPL_TOP/<product>/ $APPL_TOP/<product>/ $APPL_TOP/<product>/ APPLCSF $COMMON_TOP/admin $INST_TOP/logs/appl/conc $INST_TOP/logs/appl/conc JAVA_TOP $COMMON_TOP/java $JAVA_BASE/classes $JAVA_BASE/classes JAVA_BASE $COMMON_TOP/java $COMMON_TOP/java INST_TOP <base>/inst/appl/$context_name <base>/inst/appl/$context_name The Oracle Application Server ORACLE_HOME replaces the ORACLE_HOME provided by Oracle9i Application Server in Release 11i. The FMW ORACLE_HOME replaces the OracleAS based ORACLE_HOME used in Oracle E-Business Suite 12.x releases prior to EBS R12 Upgrade You can upgrade EBS to 12.2 from versions 11i, 12.0 and Following figure shows the version supported for direct upgrade to When you upgrade, the version is , you must upgrade to or Upgrading to 12.1 and 12.2 from has similar major steps. The main difference is that after the upgrade, the upgrade to is done online. So, after the upgrade, you must build the file systems required for online patching. COLLABORATE 14 Copyright 2014 by Biju Thomas Page 3

4 The following table shows the major upgrade steps involved in upgrading to and Database already on 11gR2 release Database already using OATM Applied the 11i.AD.I.6 Minipack TUMS Patch and Report - lists tasks that you can omit from the upgrade because they do not apply to your system Functional Steps Lay down file system [Rapid Install or Restore] AD Upgrade Driver for (patch ) American English unified driver (u drv) Apply latest product patches Upgrade to Use AutoPatch to apply R12.AD.B.DELTA.3 Patch Use AutoPatch to apply Oracle E-Business Suite Release Patch Use AutoPatch to apply the latest consolidated online help Patch Post patches Pre-Requisites Upgrade to Base Release 12.x.1 Upgrade to 12.x.3 Release Database already on 11gR2 release Database already using OATM Applied the 11i.AD.I.6 Minipack TUMS Patch and Report - lists tasks that you can omit from the upgrade because they do not apply to your system Functional Steps Lay down file system [Rapid Install or Restore] AD Upgrade Driver for 12.2 (patch ) American English unified driver (u drv) Rapid Install again to Configure Upgraded Instance Enable Online Patching Synchronize the secondary file system Apply latest AD and TXK patchsets Apply latest product patches Upgrade to from Consolidated Seed Table Upgrade Patch Outage required, shutdown services and start only WebLogic Admin server. Apply the Suite-Wide Release Update Pack Online patch Synchronize file systems Apply any product patches There are several tunable components in the EBS R12 upgrade. We just have to look in the log files, look in the database, look server utilization, and look for waits to tune EBS upgrade. Each customer implementation is different and how they use EBS is different. So, what is applicable in one instance may not be applicable in another, but by providing the information, you are equipped to look in these areas to improve the performance. EBS R12 Upgrade Tuning I have to apologize here, I hoped to perform a 12.2 upgrade before the paper submission deadline to compare the upgrade tuning options and upgrade timing on the same database, with same data. Unfortunately, could not get to 12.2 upgrade. But want to share with you how upgrade time was reduced from over 60 hours outage window to under 36 hours outage window. May be I can discuss during the session about the R12.2 upgrade. COLLABORATE 14 Copyright 2014 by Biju Thomas Page 4

5 We had access to the production hardware much before the production upgrade and hence we could setup and do all the tries in the production upgrade, thus minimize the risk of interfaces and reuse several components. The following is the high level steps involved in the upgrade. BEFORE OUTAGE PREPARE 11i SYSTEM R Upgrade R Upgrade Post Upgrade Steps Setup ASM and RAC cluster on production database server Apply TUMS patch in production database and run report Setup Standby Database from existing production database server to new database server Disable all debugging Apply SLA patch Run purge programs Run gather schema stats Export discoverer and archive schema Lay down file system from backup Shutdown existing production services Break Standby and start database Prepare database for upgrade Start American English upgrade driver Post patches and CUP2 patches Configure application & Validate application Upgrade patches Validate application RPC and Product patches Restore tech stack and Java directory Start DB in RAC mode Restore saved Context files and run autoconfig CEMLI file system restore PCP, MRP setup Handover to Functional Team Configure tools and interfaces in parallel with functional setup And, following are the major time saving tasks that helped to reduce the outage window for the production upgrade. Storage change from EMC Clariion to VMAX with SSD. This made a huge difference and completely eliminated the I/O waits on the database node. Thus increased CPU and memory utilization on the database server, hence added more memory and CPU to one node in production where upgrade was performed. Upgrade RAC database with only one node (as non-rac database). Start DB as RAC after upgrade. When two nodes of the RAC was up during the upgrade, there were lot of contention and upgrade ran slower. The distributed patching with RAC also did not do well. Review timing report and skip jobs that are running against unused modules (after confirming with Oracle Support). The biggest gain was by skipping a job that ran for over 6 hours - for iprocurement, the module is not used in this EBS. COLLABORATE 14 Copyright 2014 by Biju Thomas Page 5

6 Skip install/setup by using Save and Restore. Since the practice runs were done in the production hardware, it was possible to save and restore several items. This saved a lot of time. o Rapid Install file system. o Tech stack Oracle home with latest patches. o CEMLI directories o Context Files, spfile, tnsnames.ora, listener.ora files o Key profiles, PCP configuration, MRP setup o Discoverer Noetix EU Schema Entropy waits problem - Setup rngd daemon on application nodes. During the and upgrades noticed, Java processes were waiting on random number generation for a long time (cumulative waits). But starting the rngd daemon, the Java processes started completing in 1/10th time. Distributed patching helped reduce the time by about 30%. Continuous Compile of invalid objects in the background helped reduce the recompile object time at the end of upgrade. EBS R12 Maintenance Task Differences 12.1 and 12.2 Patching always been using adpatch utility in 11i and 12.1, but with online patching, new tool adop is introduced. All the patches are applied online in For more information on online patching, refer to Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance Guide Release To facilitate online patching, Oracle EBS uses editioned file system and uses the Edition Based Redefinition feature of the 11gR2 database. FS-1 (Production file system) o Used by the current users of the system FS-2 (Copy of Production file system) o Used by the patching tools FS-NE (Non Editioned file system) o Stores data that is stored on the file system Data import and export files Report output Log files The following scripts are used to start and stop services. The services that existing in pre-12.2 release use the same script names. Start, Stop All Services o adstrtal.sh, adstpall.sh HTTP Server o adapcctl.sh Concurrent Manager o adcmctl.sh COLLABORATE 14 Copyright 2014 by Biju Thomas Page 6

7 Forms Server o adformsrvctl.sh Web Application Services o admanagedsrvctl.sh WebLogic Admin o adadminsrvctl.sh Process Manager o adopmnctl.sh Cloning steps are also slightly different in Similar to previous releases you run the adpreclone.pl appstier on the source system. It creates the required Fusion Middle Ware home files as zip files under $COMMON_TOP/clone/FMW directory. The INST_TOP is not required to copy during cloning, same as All the directories under EBSApps need to be copied to the target system, this includes the FMW zip files. The adcfgclone.pl appstier script need to be run on both Run Edition File System as well as the Patch Edition File System to complete the clone. Conclusion Now that you have seen the technology differences between 12.1 and 12.2 as well the additional benefits of going to 12.2, it is time to decide which version to upgrade to. Since is fairly new, it is appropriate to wait until more bugs are discovered and fixed. If you are small EBS shop, or finding outage window for maintenance patches is hard in the environment, you should consider 12.2 release. COLLABORATE 14 Copyright 2014 by Biju Thomas Page 7