Patch Management of an Oracle Identity Management Deployment

Today I’d like to discuss a very important topic which is patch management in an Oracle IDM/IAM deployment.  Patching seems like a pretty basic topic.  It is often taken for granted.  However, experience has shown me that patching is a frequent source of confusion for many enterprise software customers including those deploying the Oracle Identity Management  stack.

So, I thought I’d address some common questions / topics related to patching so that people have a better understanding of what patches to apply to their environments and when to apply them. 

This post is a part of both the OAM 11g academy and OIM 11g academy series.

Where to Find Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Manager Bundle Patches and Releases

I wanted to make a quick post to primarily let people know where to find bundle patches for Oracle Access Manager (OAM) and Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) patches. While I’m at it I will also cover where to find the major releases and patch sets (which are basically minor or mid-level releases) for OAM, OIM, and other Oracle IAM products.

While not entirely specific to OAM 11g, I’ll be including this post in my OAM 11g Academy Series. To view the first post in the series which will be updated throughout to contain links to the entire series, click here.

For those of you who are new to working with OAM and OIM (or Oracle products in general), patches for OAM and OIM are released in semi-regular bundles called bundle patches. These patches are easily applied using the OPATCH utility which I discussed in this previous post. For both OAM and OIM the bundle patches are cumulative. However, this is not necessarily the case for all Fusion Middleware Products or even all IAM products from Oracle.

For OAM, there is a nice article on support.oracle.com that includes the entire bundle patch history for OAM 11g, 10.3 and 10.2 with links to each patch. The article is updated with the release of every new bundle patch. So, it’s basically one stop shopping for what you need to know about patching OAM. The article number is 736372.1 and can be found by searching support.oracle.com or following this link.

For OIM, there doesn’t seem to be an exactly equivalent article but there does seem to be one or two articles per major release or patch set on bundle patches for that release which do appear to be getting updated as new patch sets come out. This includes:
Article 1247564.1 includes a list of patch sets for OIM 11g that includes the issues fixed in each patch set.

Article 1275998.1 is another article containing patch sets for OIM 11g that cross references the bundle patch numbers with the actual patch numbers. There are also links on this page to equivalent articles for OIM 9.x releases.

As for major releases and patch sets (a misleading name, think of them as minor to mid-level releases), the place to go is the following page on OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/id-mgmt/downloads/index.html

That page will take you to the appropriate page for 11g packages and the older 10g packages.

Oracle Entitlement Server patches

I've gotten quite a few questions about where to find the OES patches on Metalink and thought it better to publish publicly.

To get OES CP2 login to metalink and then select in order:

• Patches and Updates
• Quick Links to: Latest Patchsets, Mini Packs and Maintenance Packs
• Oracle Entitlements Server
• MS Windows 32 bit
• 10g R3

Obviously if you want Linux or Solaris patches swap that for Windows.

Also don't forget when installing OES that you have to have a static IP address for the admin server. You can probably do an install on a DHCP enabled host but the next time you get a new IP address everything will go sideways.

--

Update: As of April 2010 CP4 is now available and is recommended for all users using OES.