I have been testing for a while with 11.2 in a standalone server
environment. ( This means no RAC no cluster but does include the grid
infrastructure in 1 home ( to support ASM ) and database software in a
2nd different home ).

I had been testing using 11.2.0.2 patched up ( via patchset update )
to 11.2.0.2.3.

With the recent 11.2.0.3 availability I decided to go ahead and start
testing using 11.2.0.3 versus latest patch set updates to 11.2.0.2.

For my system ( and really most anyones system I recommend considering
this option ) I had ripped out all possibility of Oracle restart
bringing up things on its own. I don't want any kind of software
trying to restart things after a server reboot. Maybe you still have
disk problems or disk controller problems or unstable os configuration
or who knows what?

So on my systems that are going to run 11.2 I am going to disable all
the Oracle restart stuff. That's just the way I am going to roll.

To do that you run commands like ( as root I think ) crsctl disable
has and then as grid owner srvctl disable asm and srvctl disable
listener and etc. Piece by piece you make sure that all the
components are turned off.

I found out during the 11.2.0.3 upgrade process ( yes I put that into
different oracle homes aka out of place upgrades and then ripped out
eventually the old obsolete oracle homes don't get me started on that
one ) that disabling the oracle restart configuration creates issues
for dbua.

At some point dbua tries to figure out if the database getting
upgraded uses asm ( that part worked ) then dbua tries to see if asm
is running ( maybe to check that asm has already been upgraded ??? )
eventually.

Sure looks like dbua does the equivalent of "srvctl status asm" ...

If you have disable restart config for asm the srvctl status asm says
asm is not running. Even though it is running.

The dbua apparently also mis interprets the response of it's check for
asm running. It will tell you that you need to run asmca to upgrade
asm ( instead of telling you that it's check to see if asm was running
seemed to return that it is not running ). Since you already upgraded
asm as part of the grid infrastructure upgrade that gets confusing.

To actually get the dbua to upgrade you have to ( grumble grumble ) re-
enable restart for asm ( srvctl enable asm ) so that the check being
run by dbua works. Then you can later disable it again ...

Dang there is some pretty darn complicated pieces parts of 11.2 in a
grid infrastructure standalone server environment that we DBAs are
going to have to learn to deal with and get around if we don't want
the oracle software to start making bad mistakes for us.

I thought that I was pretty much done with srvctl after getting rid of
RAC but ... no it's back!

On Sun, 16 Oct 2011 03:53:20 -0700, John Hurley wrote:

if we don't want the oracle
Are you sure? I upgraded 11.2.0.2 --> 11.2.0.3 in single instance mode
and it didn't try to invoke srvctl, probably because I don't have any RAC
daemons on my PC. I will try with virtualbox, though.



--
http://mgogala.byethost5.com

Mladen;

# Are you sure?

Yeah I am sure.

# I upgraded 11.2.0.2 --> 11.2.0.3 in single instance mode and it
didn't try to invoke srvctl, probably because I don't have any RAC
daemons on my PC. I will try with virtualbox, though.

Are you running ASM? Using 2 separate homes for Grid Infrastructure?

Did you disable the restart config like I noted in my post before
doing the upgrade?

As I noted the symptom is that dbua will not work in that
configuration when "srvctl status asm" reports that "it does not think
that asm is running" ...

Aka ASM is not running.