Cloud control patching to 12.1.0.4

So cloud control 12.1.0.4 came out a couple of months ago now and i waited to seee how other people fared with their upgrades before i went ahead with ours. We (as i guess many other people do) have no 'test' cloud control - we have one install (to rule tham all?) so you just have to go for it....

Gokhan and Tim both seemed to say it was a breeze which gave me some confidence that it would work without issue.

I won;t go through all the steps in detail as the release notes (and the blogs above do a good job of that). However i would say take not of the following lines in the upgrade notes as this should give you suffcient warning that you really need to read them....

"If you do not apply these patches, you will run into upgrade failures that cannot be corrected."

So you have been warned :-)

Also make sure you back up all the components (db, OMS,weblogic and inventory)

So anyway - a quick summary of the upgrade:

We have:

1325 targets
58 hosts
226 databases

OMS server has 2x2.27Ghx quad core processors and server has 100GB of RAM. It is not dedicated for cloud control - there is other stuff on there too.

Database suppository repository is 33GB (well the MGMT_TABLESPACE is everything else is small by comparison)

We've been running cloud control since it came out (2 or 3 years ago - can't remember exactly) and we've been through every major patch version since that

The actual upgrade took (end to end) about 3 hours, there were a couple of points where it failed (once due to a full tablespace - thats what happens when the monitoring system is turned off :-)) and once due to a full filesystem.

I'm happy to say the installer coped fine with both of those and was just able to retry and pick up from where it go to - nice job developers who wrote that - very impressed - older versions this would have meant restore of everything and try again.

I only so far upgraded the agent on the OMS host and all the others are still 12.1.0.3 - this works fine and is supported. I'll upgrade these at a later date.

BI Publisher is meant to be installed for you in this version - but i think my attempt in 12.1.0.3 which failed has left some stuff behind and the installer didnt try and do it. I'll have to have another go at this manually.

So far it looks good - screens subtlely changed and seem a little quicker to me too....