If you have an ODA you have been thru the Oracle Database Appliance configurator. Oracle Also provides an offline version for people to build the configs before even going to build the box.
Just a quick note that if you used the ODA Offline Configurator  V2.1 the files will not work with configurator 2.2
to fix that please add the following to your old config file


This will allow the 2.1 config file to be loaded into and modified by the 2.2 configurator 

The First Oracle Database Appliance Significant version patch is now available ODA Patch 2.2.0  is a very significant patch since it upgrade the OS from 5.5 to UEK 5.8 and also upgrade the database from 11.2.0.2 to 11.2.0.3.2
Change Log Entries

• This patch will upgrade the existing OEL 5.5 to UEK 5.8.
• End-User GI/RDBMS 11.2.0.3.2 GI PSU2 clone files.  This patch can upgrade the existing 11.2.0.2[4,5] to 11.2.0.3.2.
• CHM is Re-enabled again. 

Patch 13858874 is what is needed .
I will update this blog post with my experience updating to 2.2.0

Please note the following
Issue:  Unable to Roll back to previous versions
Workaround : Roll back to previous versions is not supported.

As Promised Embedded below is my presentation and paper that i presented at this years Collaborate Conference. Looking for feedback from the community 

IOUG is a phenomenal learning experience and is a great way to meet and network with your peers. So far my  3 days Here have been excellent. My Paper was selected this year and i had a blast talking about my experiences at IOUG. I'm going to be posting my paper and presentation via a seperate blog post  for people to find. The conversations were absolutely fabulous. I've had and have been having  conversations  on tops from  ops dba vs performance engineer to ODA's and RAC on VM's . All these are very relevant topics and get me more interested and involved.
The Day0/1 Started off With Deep dives. The Real World Performance tour Deep  dive was fun and educational  with Andrew Holsworth Graham Wood & Tom Kyte  engaging the audiences with real world scenarios. The Real Opening of Collaborate was  the very inspirational talk by Cmdt mark Kelly, a very good keynote. Sessions kicked off with a bnag and it was  one Session to another. I was fortunate to go to alot of sessions  and present my session on Monday.  Tuesday had another Fabulous session line up and its still going strong.
Everyone can follow the conversation via #c12lv and  i can be found @fuadar.
Here to 2 more days of fully packed education. I'm also attaching some interesting pics from around the conference.Also My Twitter media Gallery has a lot of pics;
If you see me , Please say Hi.

11.2.0.3 isnt all that new with PSU1  already out i decided that this should be  a good time to build all new environments with 11.2.0.3 PSU1 .
After building the GI and the DB's (RAC and Non-RAC). I stumbled upon this document
AIX: Top Things to DO NOW to Stabilize 11gR2 GI/RAC Cluster [ID 1427855.1]
This
This is an interesting note and should be followed after the install since it talks about how many bugs Oracle 11.2.0.3 has on the AIX Platform.
The most important one is the orarootagent memory leak  for which the following is recommended
If you are running 11.2.0.3, apply 11.2.0.3 GI PSU1 (patch 13348650) and patch 12709476
There are also other issues that the above note will let you know including OS fixes that you need to put in.
It is very important to follow some of the  recommendation to avoid service interruptions.
Some of the bugs seem to be fixed in 11.2.0.3 PSU2 which should be out shortly.
There is also this noteto consider which takes about the optimizer problems. Most of  these will not be in the PSU and oneoffs will need to be considered.
Things to Consider Before Upgrading to 11.2.0.3 to Avoid Poor Performance or Wrong Results [ID 1392633.1]

So off to patching and fixing my new environments and builds .

A Mandatory patch for the Oracle Database Appliance has been  released to update the OAK processes.
This patch was Released 03/19/2012 and is very important sicne a  disk failure can trigger a system shutdown.
The Details of the patch are available on MOS ID # 1438089.1. This patch does not require any outage on the ODA boxes . it took about 1 minute per box to apply.
 

When any vendor launches a product there is always skepticism  on  claims that we will have a database up and running on a brand new box in data center in under 2 hours. As every one know getting a RAC cluster built on enterprise hardware requires a lot of leg work. you need VLAN's , switch ports assigned . Built an interconnect architecture to meet Oracle Best practices .
In Short order it takes time to get brand new physical hardware up and running with a fully functional Oracle RAC Database. Cue the Oracle Database Appliance (ODA).  The ODA is a new 2 physical nodes, 24 cores and 192GB with about 4.5 TB usable disk . The interconnect is built into the appliance, so only network connectivity needed is to the public network. Network ports are bonded and you get 1GB and 10GB ports .
The deployment procedure is simple and 8 step setup poster gets you a DB up and running.
The DB deployment and patching is handled thru the OAK command set. oakcli is used for deployments , patching , validation and diagnostics of the appliance.
We were able to get a working RAC  DB on 2 nodes in about 60 minutes which was very impressive. I'm still playing around with the appliance and will post more cool features as i find them. The ODA seems to an ideal appliance for deploying small to medium databases pretty quickly.

COLLABORATE 12 Session Details - High Availability Boot Camp: Migrating from Single Instance to RAC and Upgrading - A Dataguard Success Story

Oracle OpenWorld  Came to a close Oct 7. Unfortunately too many issues prevented me from posting anything to this blog.
This year was the Year of the Cloud at Oracle Openworld.  Oracle released many products including Exalytics, The Oracle Database Appliance, The Big Data Appliance,  Oracle R Enterprise , Oracle Enterprise Manager 12C  (Cloud Control) and Oracle in the Cloud. These were just the big announcements but there was alot of fun and learning this year.  The RAC Attack OTN Lounge was the best place to hangout since there were so many people to learn  from . It is always interesting to meet people from All Aorund the world with a variety of experiences and exposure to so many technologies.

The Bloggers meetup was the culmination and the meeting of all the minds from all over the Oracle Community . Sponsored by the Good old folks at Pythian . This was a very well done and fun event.
My takeaways and the most exciting thing for me has been EM 12C . I plan on playing around with it and understanding how it can benefit me and my team.
It was very sad to be in CA when Steve Jobs died and  hearing about it during Larry's big keynote. Truly an inspirational person.
Some funny some Sad pictures from my Days at Openworld .

Day 1 here was IOUG Day.
There were a lot of good  sessions .

One of my Favorite for the Day was Arup Nanda's Exadata for DBA's . It was  very well presented   and Arup has already posted the details at his blog.
The RAC Expert Panel SIG was very well done and it seems like most of the questions were related to 11.2.0.3 which was just released Last Week.
The Announcement of the Day was the new member of the Exa family #Exalytics. Exalytics is a BI optimized Server. Larry Ellison announced the new addition to the Family along with his familiar Next Slide Please.
Since BI has not been my area. I'll defer to the pros like Alex Gorbachev to explain and the details are on Alex's Blog.
It Seems Like there will be a flurry of announcement this weeks and stay tuned on this Blog and My twitter Feed as well #oow11.
Some Pics of Day 1 are below for #oow11