Does Oracle support rolling upgrades in a cluster?
This answer is for clusters running the Oracle stack. If 3rd party vendor clusterware in included, you need to check with the vendor about their support of a rolling upgrade. By a rolling upgrade, we mean upgrading software (Oracle Database, Oracle Clusterware, ASM or the OS itself) while the cluster is operational by shutting down a node, upgrading the software on that node, and then reintegrating it into the cluster, and so forth one node at a time until all the nodes in the cluster are at the new software level. For the Oracle Database software, it is possible only for certain single patches that are marked as rolling upgrade compatible. Most Bundle patches and Critical Patch Updates (CPU) are rolling upgradeable. Patchsets and DB version (10g to 11g) changes are not supported in a rolling fashion, one reason that this may be impossible is that across major releases, there may be incompatible versions of the system tablespace, for example. To upgrade these in a rolling fashion one w
