I still consider myself fairly new to the Oracle Linux world as I previously was a SUSE Linux administrator. The management portions are a bit different especially in the new world of Ksplice. All my Linux servers today are running Oracle Linux 7 RHCK with a few OL6 thrown in the mix. I am hoping to get these upgraded to 7 or 8 sometime later this year.
Previously, I had a question about setting up Ksplice with my Oracle supported version of Spacewalk and finally got around to setting that up. What I haven't done yet, still trying to wrap my head around this new technology, is attempt to update a client with Ksplice.
I was reading up on the Ksplice documentation and plan to leverage the enhanced client, not really clear on the differences but 'enhanced' has to be better right? With using spacewalk I am not sure how I deploy this enhanced client. Then once I do deploy the Ksplice client do I patch and update my servers with Ksplice just like I have in the past? If I go several months without a reboot when I finally reboot the servers will they know to boot into the latest kernel?
To add to this mix I am kicking off a formal project to move our Oracle databases off of Power running on AIX to OL 7 or OL 8. Not sure what version would be better but from a support standpoint probably will be 8 with the UEK kernel. Even though all my other workload is running RHCK from what I've read UEK will provide more benefits with running Oracle databases and workloads. I do want to manage these via Ksplice as well simply to reduce the amount of reboots. If I can continue to keep the Oracle Linux servers patched and only need to reboot quarterly or bi-yearly that would be huge, especially the UEK Oracle database running servers.
In doing so, would I then need to create two separate Ksplice channels in Spacewalk 2.7? One for RHCK and another or the UEK kernels?
Questions upon questions and I am still I will have more. This world is full of endless possiblities. Thanks in advance!