Pre-clone steps for Cloning Release 12 Oracle Applications E-Business Suite

Article by Rampant author Ben Prusinski

This article will cover the pre-clone steps required to perform a successful clone for Oracle Applications R12. As an Apps DBA, the ability to quickly produce clones is mandatory to be a successful EBS DBA. The following post will show details on how to clone. First let’s get started with the prep work.

Part I: Pre-Clone Steps

Unlike a regular Oracle database environment, cloning the E-Business Suite is a complex affair. You need to prepare the source and target environments before a clone operation can be performed.

Part IA: Prepare clone environments

As a precaution, I advise you to follow any pre-reqs on My Oracle Support (formerly Metalink) and to download and apply the latest AD, Autoconfig template, and Rapid Clone patches before we begin. This will save you the potential headache and risk of failed clone operations due to a patch that should have been applied before doing the cloning steps.

1. First make sure to source the environments for oracle and applmgr environments for the database and applications tiers.
   
   
2. Shutdown apps tier and run autoconfig on apps tier
   
   $ADMIN_SCRIPTS_HOME/adstpall.sh or $INST_TOP/admin/scripts/adstpall.sh
   $ADMIN_SCRIPTS_HOME/adautocfg.sh or $INST_TOP/admin/scripts/adautocfg.sh
   
   Note: you will need to enter your password for APPS for these scripts
   
   As a precaution, I advise you to first backup context file before cloning.
   
   
3.  As applmgr user on apps tier, create the appsutil file for the pre-clone steps
   Oracle supplies a script called admkappsutil.pl to generate the new appsutil file which you will need to do the pre-clone. On the applications tier as the applmgr OS user run:
   
   perl $AD_TOP/bin/admkappsutil.pl

Review the log files from the script to ensure that no errors have occurred before taking the next step, then scroll down and verify it worked.

Part IB: run pre-clone scripts for database tier

Now that we have completed the required prep work for our cloning operations, we need to run the pre-clone scripts for the database and applications tiers before we can clone the environment.

Oracle Release 12 actually starting with release 11i for E-Business Suite has a suite of perl scripts that perform the heavy lifting for us in terms of these cloning scripts. First, we need to pre-clone the database tier and then we run the pre-clone script for the apps tier. Both the Sequence and syntax are critical here or the clone will fail.

The pre-clone script for database and apps tier are called adpreclone.pl. It lives under the
$ORACLE_HOME/appsutil/scripts/ directory on the database tier.

If you are a curious DBA like me, you can look at the script with your favorite editor such as VI or EMACS.

Warning (Achtung!): Do not play around and make changes to any of these scripts without the advice of Oracle Support!

Warning: Kids do not try changing these scripts on a production system! Tricks are for kids not silly rabbits to paraphrase my favorite cereal commercial.

OK Let's run it!

First you will need to enter the APPS password for the script to execute.

Make sure that it runs for a few minutes and then completes without errors after which we verify the status in the logfile.  It is always a good idea to scroll down and check to see that all ran fine without errors.

Ok so now we need to run the pre-clone script on the apps tier as the applmgr OS user. Since we are running this on Linux platform the script is a shell script.

Part IC: Run the pre-clone scripts for apps tier

The pre-clone script for apps tier is located under the $INST_TOP/admin/scripts or $ADMIN_SCRIPTS_HOME directory and is called adpreclone.sh. To execute it we logon as applmgr user and run perl $INST_TOP/admin/scripts/adpreclone.sh appsTier and you need to enter the APPS password at the prompt.

Be sure to use the syntax EXACTLY as shown above or the preclone will FAIL!

This will run for a short time maybe 5-10 minutes and then complete. Verify that your preclone ran without errors. Check the log file generated by the adpreclone.sh script for the apps tier to ensure no errors have occurred as shown in the examples below.

Now we are finally ready to clone! In future articles, I will show you the actual cloning steps to clone R12 EBS.