Oracle Home Cloning

Have you ever imagine how easy it would be if you could just clone an existing installation of Oracle Software from one server to another server without performing a fresh installation!

You might have definitely heard of Oracle Database cloning but you can even clone Oracle home without performing a fresh installation. It makes your life easy if you are planning to perform Oracle software installation on multiple servers at once.

Benefits

• One time installation and clone the installation to all other servers

• Saves time and simple to perform

• No need to fire Oracle Installer on all servers

Important: I will never use this method for production server installation as I just want it to be a clean installation. This method is good for single instance DB and not for RAC DBs. Always make sure the source and the destination servers have same setup and all pre-requisites completed.

Cloning Steps

On source machine, stop all the databases, listener and all other Oracle services running out from the ORACLE_HOME you want to clone

SQL> shut immediate;

# lsnrctl stop listener

Go to ORACLE_HOME location and come out one directory path

cd $ORACLE_HOME
cd ..

Create a tar file of the ORACLE_HOME directory. In our example, the Oracle software binaries are installed under 12.2.0 directory

# tar -cvf oracle_home.tar 12.2.0

Copy the above tar file onto the target server ORACLE_HOME location. This ORACLE_HOME location can be different from the source ORACLE_HOME location. Unzip (or un-tar) the tar file

# tar -xvf oracle_home.tar

Make sure on the new server the ORACLE_HOME is set to correct parth

# env | grep ORA

Run the clone perl script. Make sure to give proper ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_BASE locations

$ORACLE_HOME/perl/bin/perl $ORACLE_HOME/clone/bin/clone.pl ORACLE_BASE="/ora/app/oracle/" ORACLE_HOME="/ora/app/oracle/clone_home/12.2.0"
OSDBA_GROUP=dba OSOPER_GROUP=oper -defaultHomeName

Now you can create database using DBCA from the clone ORACLE_HOME

dbca -silent -createDatabase -templateName General_Purpose.dbc -gdbName oraclo -sid oraclo -createAsContainerDatabase false -SysPassword sys -SystemPassword sys -emConfiguration NONE -datafileDestination /ora/data/oracle/db_files -storageType FS -characterSet AL32UTF8 -totalMemory 2048 -recoveryAreaDestination /ora/app/oracle/fast_recovery_area