Oracle SuperCluster Health Check Using Exachk Utility

Oracle provides "Exachk" utility to conduct a comprehensive Health Check on Oracle SuperCluster to validate hardware, firmware and configuration. Exachk Utility is available for Oracle Engineered Systems such as Exadata (V2 and above), Exalogic, Exalytics, SuperCluster, MiniCluster, ZDLRA & Big Data. 

When Exachk is run from the primary LDOM as user 'root' it will discover and run exachk utility for each component:

• Configuration checks for Compute nodes, Storage cells and InfiniBand Switches
• Grid Infrastructure, Database and ASM and Operating System software checks

When Exachk is run in a Database zone or Virtualized environment it will collect data for:

• All RAC Node
• All Database Instance
• Grid Infrastructure

You can also run Exachk on a specific component such as:

• Database Servers
• Storage Cells
• Infiniband Switches
• Grid Infrastructure, Database & ASM and so on

It is recommended to run Exachk as root user and have SSH equivalence setup in the SuperCluster. But you can run Exachk as ordinary user and without having root ssh setup.

It is recommended to execute the latest exachk at the following situation:

• Monthly
• Before any planned maintenance activity
• Immediately after completion of planned maintenance activity
• Immediately after an outage or incident

Exachk Binary and output file location:

• Default Exachk Location: /opt/oracle.SupportTools/exachk
• Defautl Exachk Output Location: /opt/oracle.SupportTools/exachk

Courtesy Oracle

Steps to Deploy and Execute Exachk utility on SuperCluster

• Download Latest Exachk Utility

You can download the latest Exachk from MOS note 1070954.1

• Download deploy_exachk.sh script to deploy and install Exachk in all Primary LDOM and in each Zone

• Copy the downloaded Exachk utility and deploy_exachk.sh into /opt/oracle.SupportTools

# cd /opt/oracle.SupportTools
# mv exachk Exachk-bkp

• Deploy Exachk as follows

# cd /opt/oracle.SupportTools/
# ./deploy_exachk.sh exachk.zip
# ls -ltr
# cd exachk
# ls -l exachk

As of writing the latest Exachk available is 18.2.0_20180518

• Verify Exachk Version on LDOM

# cd /opt/oracle.SupportTools/exachk
# ./exachk -v

• To verify Exachk version on all zones in a LDOM

# zoneadm list | grep -v global > zone_list
# hostname >> zone_list
# /opt/oracle.supercluster/bin/dcli -g zone_list -l root /opt/oracle.SupportTools/exachk/exachk -v

Note: root RSA keys should be set up for SSH

• Execute Exachk on Primary LDOM or Global Zone

# cd /opt/oracle.SupportTools/exachk
# ./exachk

• Execute Exachk in non-global zone local zone

Login to non-global zone local zone using zlogin and execute the following commands

# zlogin <hostname>
# cd /opt/oracle.SupportTools/exachk
# ./exachk

Important Note: In zones there is currently an issue with discovery, and so one must set the RAT_ORACLE_HOME and RAT_GRID_HOME environment variables in some cases.


Conclusion
In this article we have learned to perform Oracle SuperCluster Stack Health Check using Exachk utility. Exachk Utility is available for Oracle Engineered Systems such as Exadata (V2 and above), Exalogi, Exalytics, SuperCluster, MiniCluster, ZDLRA & Big Data.