Oracle Restart Silent Installation

Being a remote DBA (iDBA 2.0?) working for Pythian, I never see the servers that run the databases I connect to.

But do I have to? Term “remote” is very widespread today. We use remote controls for lots of devices, manage our bank accounts remotely, communicate to our parents and over phones, and so on. So why should we meet servers personally? Everything can be done remotely and that’s why silent installation of Oracle software is very important for database administrators.

Oracle continues to develop and improve that process, and nowadays for smooth and quick installation is just a matter of the proper definition of parameters.

I had had some experience with silent (and not always successful) installation of Oracle versions 8 and 9, but thanks to an excellent post, Oracle Silent Mode, Part 1: Installation Of 10.2 And 11.1 Databases by Grégory Guillou, I got a new splash of joy using silent installations. RDBMS, Oracle Grid Control, agents, scheduler agents, collaboration software, etc., can be installed using the silent installation in latest versions. This post is about silent installation of one of the new Oracle 11g Rel.2 options called Oracle Restart.

Grégory has already blogged about this: Oracle 11.2 Restart (it’s French but that’s no problem for iDBA 2.0, right?). In my case, I already have 11.1 and 11.2 databases created on a VM. Datafiles were placed into the file system, and I wanted to see how I could use Oracle High Availability Service to manage existing databases.

For that kind of installation, I downloaded Grid Infrastructure, and using the response file crs_install.rsp, executed the installer in silent mode:

./runInstaller -silent -responseFile /u03/install/11gR2/grid/response/crs_install.rsp ORACLE_BASE="/u04/app/oracle" ORACLE_HOME="/u04/app/11.2.0/grid" oracle.install.option="CRS_SWONLY oracle.install.asm.OSDBA=asmdba oracle.install.asm.OSOPER=asmoper oracle.install.asm.OSASM=asmadmin

Unfortunately, I could not ignore all prerequisites such as the start of the ntp daemon and account belonging to asm* groups, even though I used the -ignorePrereq parameter.

The installation was completed and I executed a couple of scripts to accomplish the process and configured Oracle High Availability Services on the node.

After that, I added existing databases (11.1 and 11.2) to cluster Oracle HA Service using srvctl command. srvctl add database -d ...

I noted that /etc/oratab was updated during configuration and even after I removed the entry from it, it appeared again when I bounced the server.

Also, the oraenv script still doesn’t change the ORACLE_BASE variable properly (as I mentioned in switching $ORACLE_BASE using oraenv in 11g), and it leaves the same value as for previous home even they are different.

Have a good day!