Cloning an existing ORACLE_HOME on Unix

Before we go further into this section, we need to understand the purpose of cloning and advantage of cloning the Oracle home binaries.

At what circumstance, cloning  oracle home is useful?

1) When you setup the standby database, you don't want to install the oracle binary from the scratch. You might install some extra component or you might miss some component which is not in primary database.  The best practice, it is always primary and standby should be Apple to Apple. Binary cloning will be appropriate for setting up the standby database server.

2) If you are performing multiple oracle database installations on several server as Production, Pre-production, Development, QA and Test, then you may want to use binary cloning to make sure you install same component across the environment.  This approach is much faster than installing from the scratch and then applying  PSU/CPU patch on each server.

Source Database : devdb12
Target Database : devdb13

The Binary version is 11.2.0.4
Oracle home : /ora/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_4

Step 1(Clone the binary in source database)

Login to source database:

cd /ora/app/oracle/product/11.2.0

tar -cvf oracle_110204_binaries.tar db_4

check  tar -tvf /ora/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/oracle_11204_binaries.tar |more

The above command ensure the binaries are zipped.

scp the oracle_11204_binaries.tar file to devdb13 under /ora/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/

On step1,  oracle binaries are cloned and copied to target server.

Step 2(Untar the binaries in target server)

Login to devdb13

Extract Oracle 11.2.0.4 binaries

cd /ora/app/oracle/product/11.2.0

tar -tvf oracle_11204_binaries.tar|more

tar -xvf oracle_11204_binaries.tar

Delete or move the oracle_11204_binaries.tar file if you need to.

cd /ora/app/oracle/product/11.2.0

mv oracle_11204_binaries.tar /work/exports

Step 3 (create the clone script)

cd /homo/oracle

cat clone.sh
#!/bin/sh
echo "Clone started at `date`" | tee -a clone.log
perl /ora/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_4/clone/bin/clone.pl ORACLE_BASE=/ora/app/oracle ORACLE_HOME=/ora/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_4 ORACLE_HOME_NAME=OraDb11g_home4 '-O"LOCAL_NODE=devdb13.acsrr.com"'
echo "Clone ended at `date`" | tee -a clone.log

Step 3 (Clone the binary)

nohup ./clone.sh &

Here is the cloning log screenshot, We need to execute root,sh as requested in the log file.

Unix Admin can run the  root.sh as a root user. Unix admin can
also provide sudo privilege to oracle account and DBA can run
this script.

Here is the log for executing root.sh.

sh /ora/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_4/root.sh

Performing root user operation for Oracle 11g

The following environment variables are set as:

    ORACLE_OWNER= oracle

    ORACLE_HOME= /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_4

Enter the full pathname of the local bin directory: [/usr/local/bin]:

   Copying dbhome to /usr/local/bin ...

   Copying oraenv to /usr/local/bin ...

   Copying coraenv to /usr/local/bin ...

Creating /etc/oratab file...

Entries will be added to the /etc/oratab file as needed by

Database Configuration Assistant when a database is created

Finished running generic part of root script.

Now product-specific root actions will be performed.

Finished product-specific root actions.