I've been applying PSUs to GI and DB every quarter for about 3 years now. We are a fairly small company and I have about 25 servers to patch each quarter. I've been copying the patches to each server and running opatch auto individually on each.
I'm considering a new strategy to patch once on an alpha dev server and then cloning the newly patched homes to the rest of the ecosystem. It seems feasible, but I'm a bit nervous about swapping out the GI home and DB home each quarter. Especially the GI home because of all the bits and pieces like OCR, voting disk, root permissions, etc that have to work together to have a working cluster.
Is anyone using this cloning strategy or seen it blogged anywhere? Any opinions on its merit? If I attempt this, would others be interested in my results?