Upgrades Complete

Over the past two weekends we've upgraded our Fusion Middleware stack and our E-Buisness Suite.  To say I put in quite a few extra hours would be an understatement.    The Fusion Upgrade (11.1.1.1 -> 11.1.3) went pretty smooth, other than the fact I was up sick the previous night.   I didn't get off the couch until an hour before the upgrade was to start!    I have to say, working while you are sick sucks.    

Last weekend we upgraded our EBS environment.  12.0.6 to 12.1.2, 10g DB to 11gR2 and migrating to a 64bit server.    I started 2pm on Friday and finished 6am Monday morning.  During that time I slept for a grand total of  9 hours.     I only hit one major issue during the upgrade which required opening a P1 SR with Oracle.   It took about 3 hrs to resolve, would have been quicker but my analyst went to lunch!      

The other other issue was performance.     Our DEV server crash and burned a couple of months ago, so the networking guys gave us a loaner.   It didn't even cross my mind to check the specs and compare it to our production hardware before I did a dry run to work out the timings.     I managed to shave 18 hrs off the upgrade, which I assumed was because of a few changes such as applying the patches with nocompiledb,nocompilejsp,noautocfg.     I expected the 12.1.1 patch to finish around 2am on Saturday morning.  2am came and went with the patch still running....  3am, 5am, 7am, finally 8am it finished!   

I couldn't find any significant performance issues so I looked into the server itself.    It turns out, the loaner server is twice as powerful as our prod!   I should have realized it during my dry run, but I was so busy I didn't have time to investigate.   With 2 major  upgrades back to back the last few weeks have been crazy.

Well, all done now, environment has gone live and I haven't heard of any major issues.    I did have issues cloning and will put up a post on that shortly.