# first read the readme and if the patch is an on-line patch – you don’t have to worry about the rest of this blog – online patches don’t require any outage at all – there will also be a “online” sub dir in the unzipped patch
# now for the vast majority of patches that do not support online patching – you can check to see if it supports a “rolling” patch / upgrade – read on…
# assuming opatch is in the $PATH and you have cd’d into the directory containing the patch
opatch query -all | grep -i rolling
or if you have not cd’d into the patch dir then:
opatch query –all < Patch_location > | grep -i rolling
If a patch can be performed using the rolling fashion, follow these steps to perform the rolling patch / upgrade:
Read the patch readme and thoroughly understand the pre-requisites and requisite steps
Shut down the instance on one RAC node
Shut down the CRS stack on this RAC node
Apply the patch to the RAC home on that RAC node
Start the CRS stack on the RAC node
Start the RAC instance on the RAC node Repeat steps 1 to 4 on each of the other RAC nodes in the cluster
References:
http://abcdba.com/abcdbarachowtoapplyrollingopatch