Monthly Infrastructure Maintenance Scheduling Enhancement

Transcript

We've already released a feature for managing quarterly infrastructure maintenance using scheduling preferences, scheduling policy. With that release, we already support customers to plan their scheduling of infrastructure maintenance components, which is DB servers and storage servers every quarter. To make sure every quarter, that is already released. So for quarterly maintenance, whatever controls we provide, which is setting up a quarterly scheduling policy, attaching it to the infrastructure, then planning the software components, the infrastructure components, which is which DB servers need to be built, which needs to be updated in which maintenance windows, all of this feature exists. Now what we are releasing is the same kind of scheduling policy capability for monthly infrastructure maintenance. Monthly infrastructure maintenance includes the same infrastructure components, DB servers and storage servers, but the security updates for these infrastructure components are delivered every month. Today, if customers do not provide any scheduling policy preference, Oracle automatically schedules the monthly security maintenance for the infrastructure components and applies it using Oracle's default scheduling. But with this feature, just like the quarterly maintenance, you can also specify your monthly scheduling preference for your infrastructure maintenance for applying your security updates. Everything is exactly the same as how you do quarterly, except that now you will have a monthly scheduling policy where you can define windows of how many windows you want within every month to apply your security updates for your database servers and storage servers. And you have the flexibility to define one or more windows. You can also define the order in which the updates are applied within the window. Just like you had for quarterly, you can decide which DB servers are applied in which maintenance window and which order. Same as storage servers. The only key difference is that for monthly maintenance using monthly policy, the DB servers updates are applied online. That means that they are only, they do not require a rolling restart of the, there is no rolling reboot required. They are all applied online. And this is already something which exists, but you can define your maintenance scheduling preferences, which is the new part. So you can first define a monthly scheduling policy, define one or more windows, attach it to the infrastructure for monthly maintenance. If you don't assign a scheduling policy, it will use the Oracle's default policy, which will also schedule your maintenance for monthly security updates. Once you attach the scheduling policy, then you can see the windows from the scheduling policy and specify specific infrastructure components in each window, just like you do for quarterly. So you can say that window one is where DB servers are going to be applied, updated and window two is when storage servers are going to be updated. DB servers continue to be online updated. There is no rolling reboot. Now storage servers continue to be applied in a rolling manner, rack rolling manner. So this is the new capability. And then once you have attached a scheduling policy and the monthly maintenance is scheduled based on your policy, you will see your maintenance run, security maintenance run scheduled. And you will see all of the infrastructure components scheduled, just like you have defined based on the plan. Right? And you can make the same kinds of flexibility to edit the maintenance for a given month. It exists just like you can make changes for quarterly maintenance. You can make changes to the monthly maintenance also once it is scheduled for a given month. So for a given month, you may decide that you know the maintenance windows need to be, the scheduled start time needs to be changed or you need to change the order of the updates or you may need to cancel maintenance while it is in progress. All those flexibility which exist in monthly, once it is cancelled, will automatically, all those things which, all the maintenance scheduling flexibility which exists for quarterly, as is, is also available for monthly maintenance. There is no change. In addition, we also have options to cancel a maintenance file in progress if there is a last-minute change. This also exists in quarterly. And you can also schedule, you know, change the start time of the maintenance, different from your maintenance plan. All of these features were defined in the announcement for quarterly. All these things like defining the policy. Only thing is the cadence is now monthly and it is used to deliver security maintenance. And for security DB server maintenance is done online and storage server is done rack rolling and even if you don't use the scheduling policy, you will continue to get the security maintenance applied but using Oracle's default policy. If you want to control when it gets applied, you can use the monthly scheduling policy. So that is the net benefit or that is the new feature. So the way we want to plan or send out the announcement is just referencing the old announcement saying that all the scheduling enhancements for quarterly maintenance is now available for monthly maintenance as well. That is the net net. We don't have to describe all the features again. And I already sent you a copy of the announcement we sent for quarterly maintenance.