I can create extra nodes in about 10 minutes, meaning, if they clone the Hard Disk over, change the host names and IP addy’s, I then have CRS disabled before they map it to the shared storage from the new IP’s hostnames. Once that is done, it is just renaming some directories and running some srvctl commands to add the nodes. It’s not “exactly” supported but I figured it out. I could share more with you if interested. It works great in my “play” environments.

Equally, I could see potential benefit for those sites without much knowledge at all using this type of tool just to complete the process since they aren’t familiar with opatch or other such tools.

I’d definitely give it a whirl.

@Greg I’m very interested in how you add a node from bare metal in 5 minutes and build a 4-node cluster in 10 mins. Were you serious, or exaggerating to make a point? I can do those things pretty quickly, but not to those extreme numbers…even if I script it all out with rsp files.

@Both. I admire you a lot. Both of you! And I’ve been walking in your steps a few times ;-). Regarding Provisioning or what we could name Gold Images, I’m very sure that’s just the beginning and if you’re looking for alpha/beta testers for anything that would improve the way we manage that, I’m in! As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Oracle does a lot of changes in that area in the coming years.

I’m looking forward to see Clarity manage rolling upgrade patches soon and to use orainstaller.

@gregory – it’s not a question of speed, it’s consistency, and simplicity. What happens when you get used to the prereqs on RHEL4, and all of a sudden your organization decides to start rolling out SLES 10? Or what happens when you have to wait for your SA to set up the storage? Or when you want a junior DBA to set it up? Or you have to prove to a regulatory body that every database has the latest CPU rolled out?

Gregory – good points, especially about RAC and pre/post scripts. But I think that you’re missing the main idea of the script. It’s not intended to validate your environment or check for patch conflicts – that’s all still your job. It also isn’t intended to register with OCM or deal with upgrades – just copy the bits from B24792-01_1of5.zip to an empty ORACLE_HOME.

Like you, I could get a RAC system up and running by hand in a few hours. (In fact we did it at the RAC Attack IOUG event here in Chicago.) But at some organizations I’ve worked with, Oracle is part of a packaged application that needs an automated build process using only code from CVS or clearcase – and there are nightly builds. At other organizations I’ve worked with, teams of 80 DBA’s manage several thousand oracle databases – so they standardize on heavily tested internal “builds” of Oracle with specific patch levels. The build process doesn’t register with OCM or upgrade anything; those steps are part of installing the build on a server. That build process is the specific use case that I have in mind.

That’s a good idea but probably unrealistic.

I know the subject pretty well since I’ve done a lot to automate those install/patch set/oneoff/clone with and without RAC. I’m pretty good at that btw. If you take every install as a context, you’ll easily beat any automated installation soon: In speed and quality :-). See for some examples here:
http://www.pythian.com/blogs/1046/oracle-silent-mode-part-8-add-a-node-to-a-102-rac-database

There are many issues to automate the provisioning and patching of the Oracle software. I wouldn’t assume I can do better than the provisioning Pack in that area (and it looks like you and me know what we are talking about):
* You need to download the files from eDelivery AND from Metalink
* You need to check the OS pre-requisites that are very dependent of the platform and may still today require reboot
* You have to use several tools to validate your config CVU or RDA. And sometimes there are pre-requisites available in Metalink notes
* You may have to run pre/post scripts that are in the README files
* The installer syntax can differ from one release to another (with 11.1.0.7, you have to take care of OCM, that wasn’t the case before, the procedure to patch the clusterware with 11.1.0.6 differs from the one to patch with 10.2.0.4 or 11.1.0.7)
* You may have to preform some steps as root (check CPUOCT2008 if you wonder). Depending the way the server are secured, the way to do run those scripts will differ…
* You may need to perform strict sequence of operations on several servers (In the case of rolling patch upgrades with RAC)
* You get tons of patches every week and you’ll have to keep up with them so that your orainstall can manage them all
* If you pass everything you’ll still get weird problems due to some configurations with third party software from storage layers to network specificity or clusterware.

But here is my point… On some Linux Platform, I know how to get to a point where you install a 4 node RAC with the OS and all the prerequisites in 10 min. Add a node in 5 on top of the bare metal. But who would be interested to get that level of speed ? Most projects with Oracle are dozen thousand of USD anyway. Do you think anybody really care about 2 days of work to install a RAC?

If you know somebody who care, I’d be more than interested to work with you and him ;-).

A colleague of mine pointed me to this blog post – I just wanted to let you know that we had the same idea back in 2002 and actually started a company around it – http://www.gridapp.com.

We make a software product called “Clarity” that can automate the complete build of databases, such as install, upgrade, patching, configuration, schema loading, etc. for Oracle, Oracle RAC, SQL Server, Sybase, etc.

It’s not a free software solution, but we’re always interested in creative distribution mechanisms, so if you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

Thanks!
Matt Zito
GridApp