Oracle 12.2 Grid Infrastructure installation tips

There are many sites explaining how to install Oracle GI 12.2, however, there are some special tricks which can simplify GI installation.

For once, when installing GI and then installing the huge PatchSet (which is usually around 1.4GB in size) – it takes time. A lot of time. A simple but not very well documented trick is to run the installer with a specific flag, pointing to the extracted PSU. You can obtain the PSU from Oracle document ID 2118136.2 (Oracle support plan required).

After extracting the contents of the oracle grid home to the destination directory, and after extracting the contents of the PSU to a known (other) location, run from the oracle grid home directory the following command:

./gridSetup.sh -applyPSU /path/to/PSU

(case sensitive). You will need a working $DISPLAY because following the patch apply phase, an installation window will pop up.

That said, make sure you remove (rpm -e –nodeps stix-fonts) if you are on RHEL/OEL/Centos version newer than 7.4. These fonts will prevent the GUI installer from starting (java would crash) and will cause great frustration. You can later on restore this package if you feel the urge.

Additional trick I’ve seen, but yet to try, is how to run the GI installer unattended. This can be done like this:

./gridSetup.sh -silent -responseFile /path/to/response/file.rsp
< run root.sh as directed >
./gridSetup.sh -executeConfigTools -all -silent -responseFile /path/to/response/file.rsp

Hope this helps.