Cloning Oracle Home in RAC

Cloning of Oracle software is an easy and fast way to achieve standardization across organization where all efforts put on one environment and after testing etc that environment could be used as a source of binaries. A simple tar ball could be shipped to all other servers and then untar on destination environment as a new home or replace the existing oracle home based on availability of space on destination environment.

There could be different situations where we could use this method in a little bit twisted way to achieve desired result. Possible scenarios are:

• Lost filesystem hosting oracle database software, so either new installation or cloning of software from surviving nodes in case of RAC or some other environment in case of standalone environment.
• Enterprise wide periodic patching activity where cloning could save a lot of efforts by just building an image and clone it across enterprise.
• Building new environments during migration databases across of datacenters
• Node edition in RAC also uses cloning technique