Cloning Release 12: Oracle Applications Part II: Rapid Clone techniques

Make sure pre-clone steps for Release 12 with Oracle E-Business Suite

are completed.

Now that our pre-clone is complete, its time to do the actual cloning

operation. With Release 12 for Oracle Applications, Oracle provides

a useful perl script called adcfgclone.pl as part of Rapid Clone that

performs most of the heavy lifting for cloning the E-Business Suite.

Note: 406982.1 - Cloning Oracle Applications Release 12 with Rapid

Clone

Note: 603104.1 - Troubleshooting RapidClone issues with Oracle

Applications R12

In a nutshell the cloning process is as follows:

============================================

============

I. Clone database tier from source to target environment

II. Clone applications tier from source to target

Cloning Release 12 Oracle E-Business Suite with Rapid Clone

Ok so we ran the adpreclone.pl scripts from last time and finished the

prep work for the cloning. So how do we do the actual cloning or refresh

for Release 12?

Actually the answer is that it depends on your environment. You can do a

hot clone using the Oracle Applications Management Pack (AMP) with

Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) Grid Control to cut down on downtime

window. However that requires additional licensing and installation time.

Or you could use RMAN or an Oracle hot backup to take the copy of your

source database tier and clone to the target environment. However, for

our example, we will use a simple cold backup to copy over the apps tier

and database tier from our Source EBS environment to our target system.

As I mentioned above, for cloning an Oracle Applications environment,

you would use your backup as well as copy commands manually or via a

series of UNIX or Linux shell scripts to copy over the apps and db tier as

part of the cloning.

However, in my test environment, I do not have an extra 300Gb of disk

space

so we will use the Unix/Linux mv (move) commands to simulate the clone

procedures.

If you decide to use the Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) utility to clone

the database the procedure will be different.

Reference the Oracle documentation on usage for RMAN for details.

Some details on how to use RMAN to do this are listed below:

Note: 362473.1 - Cloning E-Business Suite Using Hot Backup for Minimal

Downtime of Source Environment

Oracle® Database Backup and Recovery Basics 10g Release 2 (10.2)

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/backup.102/b14192/toc.ht

m

Oracle® Database Backup and Recovery Advanced User's Guide 10g

Release 2 (10.2)

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/backup.102/b14191/toc.ht

m

In my opinion, you should use the RMAN Duplicate database command to

take a hot backup of the database tier.

This works well and details are provided in

Note: 228257.1 RMAN 'Duplicate Database' Feature in Oracle9i /

10G and 11G

Note: If your database tier server is on 11gR1 or 11gR2 the new features

for RMAN such as encrypted backups, Data Recovery Advisor (DRA), et al

may also be of use to your backup and recovery strategy at future date. I

have a blog

post on 11g RMAN new features in a previous blog post if you have

questions on how this works with RMAN and 11g.

Ok so let's get started and cloning! First, we start with cloning the

database tier.

On the database tier, we login as the oracle OS user and shutdown both

the listener and database:

I. Clone Source database tier to target database tier server

Since we are simulating a clone procedure we create the new clone

directory for database and applications tiers as follows:

mkdir -p /dbtier12/CLONE

mkdir -p /appstier12/CLONE

Before we use Rapid Clone script (adcfgclone.pl) we need to copy over the

database and application tier files.

First we copy the application tier file system

Log on to the source system application tier nodes as the APPLMGR user

and shut down the application tier server processes. Copy the following

application tier directories from the source node to the target application

tier node:

$APPL_TOP

$COMMON_TOP

Applications Technology Stack:

Oracle 10gAS 10.1.2 Tools ORACLE_HOME

Oracle 10gAS 10.1.3 Web ($IAS_ORACLE_HOME)

So this means that for the Apps tier you need to copy over the $INST_TOP,

$COMMON_TOP, $APPL_TOP, 10.1.2 ORACLE_HOME, and 10.1.3

ORACLE_HOME directories and files

Copy the database node file system

Log on to the source system database node as the ORACLE user:

1. Perform a normal shutdown of the source system database

2. Copy the database (.dbf) files from the source system to the target

system

3. Copy the source database ORACLE_HOME to the target system

4. Start the source Applications system database and application tier

processes

For the database tier this includes the datafiles, parameter file (init.ora,

spfile) and tnsnames.ora files

In this test environment, I do not have 300+ Gb of disk space so we

simulated the copy with the UNIX/Linux mv command. However in a real

world environment you would use the cp or scp command to transfer files

from source to target systems. You would need to shutdown the database

and take a cold backup of the database and apps tiers unless you do hot

cloning and hot backup.

So now on the target we have the following clone directories:

1) Apps tier for CLONE

/apptier12/CLONE base directory for apps tier

-> 10.1.2 for CLONE ORACLE_HOME 10.1.2

-> 10.1.3 for CLONE ORACLE_HOME 10.1.3

-> appl for CLONE APPL_TOP

-> comn for CLONE COMMON_TOP

2) db tier for CLONE

/dbtier12/CLONE

CLONE 10g ORACLE_HOME -> /dbtier12/CLONE/10.2.0

CLONE datafiles /dbtier12/CLONE/db/apps_st/data

/dbtier12/CLONE/db/tech_st

We will need to keep track of this information for the upcoming step when

we run the clone scripts!

Do not set the environment files for the database tier! We need a clean

slate for

the database tier clone procedure.

Note: if you decide to do a copy of the db and apps tier files from your

source to target system, you will need to start the database tier and apps

tier services on the source system. In this example we did a Unix/Linux

move (mv) to simulate the copy

so we do not start the apps tier and db tier since both source and target

are on

the same virtual machine.

Run the clone script for db tier this is called adcfgclone.pl we can take a

sneak peak at it with vi or emacs or whatever your favorite editor

perl adcfgclone.pl dbTier

How the clone script flows

adcfgclone.pl calls the script adchkutil.sh which then calls forth the script

adclone.pl and adclonectx.pl

Note: if you do not have PD ksh installed the work around to get

adcfgclone.pl working is to edit the adchkutil.sh script to comment out the

reference in the script to look for the PD ksh shell.

Clone source database tier to target database tier

cd /dbtier12/CLONE/10.2.0/appsutil/clone/bin

perl adcfgclone.pl dbTier

enter the password for APPS then hit the key

enter the details for target system at the prompts

In our case we take the defaults since we are cloning from source to

target on same system as shown in the example below

Once we enter the choices for the prompt settings the clone will begin for

the db tier. You will need to enter settings for your target clone datafile

location (DATA_TOP) as well as database tier ORACLE_HOME location, and

other settings such as port pool.

Time to go for a coffee break! It will take some time and depends on the

size of your database. I have scripts for cloning that I usually fire off at

night time and babysit to make sure all runs smoothly.

You can tail the log file to keep track of your cloning operation. I like to

dump the clone output to a logfile as part of a script to verify things.

When it finishes you should see a successful screen like below:

Rapid Clone starts the listener and database back up once the clone is

created. We can run a few simple commands to verify that our new

database clone is online and available:

My clone took about 90 minutes for the database tier since I have a very

slow server running in a virtual machine. Your mileage may vary based on

hardware, OS and available resources. Now lets clone the apps tier and

finish our cloning!

Clone Source applications tier to target applications tier

Now that our database tier has been cloned its time to clone the apps tier

to the new target! We run the adfgclone.pl script on the source apps tier

as shown below:

For our example, The cloning script for the apps tier lives under the

following directory:

$ cd $INST_TOP/clone/bin

Login as the applmgr OS user and we run it with the following syntax:

perl adcfgclone.pl appsTier

Cloning the Applications Tier

Since I do not have the PD ksh installed it errors and then I need to edit

the adchkutl.sh script which is called by adcfgclone.pl like last time so

that it does not try to search for the PD ksh.

Rapid Clone uses a questionaire to prompt us for the details for the source

to target cloning for the applications tier similar to the questionaire in the

cloning script (adcfgclone.pl) that we ran earlier to clone the database

tier.

We enter the following for the target apps tier system prompts:

target system base directory: /appstier12/CLONE

target system Forms ORACLE_HOME /appstier12/CLONE/10.1.2

target system Web ORACLE_HOME /appstier12/CLONE/10.1.3

choose 0 for port pool like we did earlier for db tier clone

A complete list is given below:

Now we want to keep a close watch on the logs to make sure no errors

occur during the cloning for the apps tier in which we tail the logfile:

Are you ready for another coffee break? I sure hope so because I am! So

lets grab a mocha and maybe a donut while this clone runs for the next

few hours. I usually run a clone script at night time and check it every half

hour until its done.

In between the coffee and donut break, I check the status and its at 50%

and before I can drink the java or eat my donut a frantic Oracle project

manager and functional analyst are waiting for me in my DBA cube!

I calm the functional team down and fix their performance issue. Was

resource problem with JVM for the apps tier for another environment. I will

blog on a solution to this in future post. OK so we check our clone and

enter additional prompts after we had to restart it after it failed due to

port issue that I fixed and re-started the clone.

Our clone finishes and all of the app tier services are started automatically

by Rapid Clone (adcfgclone.pl) script.

And we have verification without errors.

Troubleshooting Errors during Rapid Clone - Appstier

Recall that earlier our clone failed at 74% during the cloning for the

applications tier when we ran adcfgclone.pl appsTier so I checked

the logfile under

/appstier12/CLONE/inst/apps/CLONE_tusebs/admin/log to find the

specific failure since it failed during the ApplyAppsTier phase

After looking at the logfile ApplyAppsTier_02251717.log I found the root

cause

why my clone failed was due to unable to connect to the listener and

database.

The port pool needs to be same on database and applications tier

so if you set 0 as port pool during adcfgclone.pl dbTier for db tier you

MUST USE same port pool for clone with apps tier or the clone will fail

during Appstier apply phase!!!

For Linux, you can use lsof command to find ports in use and use kill

command to free up these ports.

After the cloning scripts have run successfully, the apps and db tiers will

be started automatically by the Rapid Clone scripts.

I then reviewed the logs under

/appstier12/CLONE/comn/clone/bin

for both the source database and applications tiers and verified that all

application and database services are available.

Next we need to verify that, users can login to OAM as cloned

environment.

Sure enough, I hit the dreaded 500 Internal Error when I tried to login to

the OAM website.

Here are some good troubleshooting notes if you have 500 Internal errors

when attempt to access the OAM login page

Note: 761869.1 500 Internal Server Error

Note: 813523.1 500 Internal Server

Note: 443353.1 Guest Password mismatch

Note: 564536.1 ADSTRTAL.SH returns error TIMEOUT OUT Interrupted

Exception

Note: 331322.1

Note: 391406.1 How to get a clean Autoconfig

Note: 387859.1 Autoconfig R12

I used these to resolve the issue which involved changing settings for the

context file to allow JVM to function correctly without consuming all server

resources as well as bouncing the app and database tiers on the target

clone server.

After all was said and done, I verified that things worked for my new

clone.

As a final sanity check, I checked the database and application tier

servers for the new cloned environment.

Good the cloned database is functional and available. Lastly, I checked

that all of the application tier services were online.

Finishing Tasks for Cloning Operations

1. Workflow settings for new clone

2. Verify login and accounts work correctly

3. Check status for SSO and OID

While we did not check on workflow, this is one area that you must

address in your cloned environments. Also, run tests to check that the

authentication is working correctly with accounts that use SSO and OID. If

you do not perform these checks then users will have problems logging

into the cloned systems after a refresh.

Congratulations! You now can perform the cloning and refresh tasks that

are critical skills to have as a hardcore Oracle Apps DBA!