Simon's Tech Tips at Oracle

I'm nearly ready to rebuild my final Windows based VMWare environment to Oracle VM. I have just one virtual machine now running in VMWare that I need to migrate over to OVM and it's a Windows 2003 server. Before I do any of this I was advised to upgrade to the latest versions of OVM, 2.1.5.

Upgrading the Oracle VM Manager

First download the Oracle VM Manager ISO from edelivery and copy it somewhere onto the file system where your Oracle VM Manager is running. I actually extracted the ISO to a folder, but you could just as easily mount it.

mount -o ro,loop OracleVM-Manager-2.1.5.iso /mnt/

Then logging in as root, switch to the directory you just extracted and run ./runInstaller.sh. It asks you if you want to install, uninstall or upgrade. I selected upgrade...

Backup the database before upgrade is highly recommended, to backup the database now, choose 'N' and run:
/opt/ovs-manager-2.1/bin/backup.sh

A wise idea, so...

[root@portal opt]# cd /opt/ovs-manager-2.1/bin
[root@portal bin]# ./backup.sh
Welcome to Oracle VM Manager

Please enter the choice: [1|2]
1. Back up Oracle VM Manager
2. Restore Oracle VM Manager
1

Back up data now ...
Please enter the password for database account 'OVS':
Please enter the path and filename for the dump file (eg /tmp/ovs.dmp):/oracle/backup/ovs.dmp
Please enter the path and filename for the log file (eg /tmp/ovs.log):/oracle/backup/ovs.log
...

This ran and gave me a backup of the manager. I went back and ran the ./runInstaller script and selected upgrade. It asked me if I want to upgrade from 2.1.2 to 2.1.5 which I did and after entering in passwords for both OVS and oc4jadmin it went through the upgrade process. I had the manager running at the time and it didn't seem to mind doing the upgrade with everything running. The upgrade went smoothly and ended with;

Upgrade Oracle VM Manager successfully.
Please check the log /var/log/ovm-manager/upgrade_2.1.2_2.1.5.log for more information.

To access the Oracle VM Manager 2.1.5 home page go to:
http://127.0.0.1:8888/OVS

To access the Oracle VM Manager web services WSDL page go to:
http://127.0.0.1:8888/OVSWS/LifecycleService.wsdl
http://127.0.0.1:8888/OVSWS/ResourceService.wsdl
http://127.0.0.1:8888/OVSWS/PluginService.wsdl
http://127.0.0.1:8888/OVSWS/ServerPoolService.wsdl
http://127.0.0.1:8888/OVSWS/VirtualMachineService.wsdl
http://127.0.0.1:8888/OVSWS/AdminService.wsdl

To access the Oracle VM Manager help page go to:
http://127.0.0.1:8888/help/help


Upgrading the OVM Server

Burning a copy of the OVM 2.1.5 ISO from edelivery I booted up my server from the CD. Pressing enter at the start I was able to choose my existing 2.1.2 install and it failed to continue due to an inability to mount a partition. I had been attaching drives to this machine whilst copying off data from the array I was soon to rebuild, I had entries in my /etc/fstab that were no longer valid. So I had to reboot into the 2.1.2 install, remove the incorrect entries from the fstab and then boot back through the install process.

Finally after once again choosing my 2.1.2 install to upgrade, I was asked if I wanted to update the boot loader config. I selected "Update boot loader configuration" and left "Skip boot loader updating" unchecked. The installer continued with the upgrade and everything worked pretty darn smoothly. Box rebooted and I was able to start one of my VM's without issue.