Exadata -- Elastic config, adding one compute and one cell node to Exadata X4-2

This post will be about Exadata, but it is different than my other Exadata blog posts. Because, in this post, I will fully concantrate on the hardware related part of the work.

We recently added 1 compute node and 1 cell node to an Exadata X4-2 Quarter Rack.. So, after these actions, the machine became Elastically configured, as it was not an X4-2 Quarter Rack anymore.

If you are asking about the support thing, my answer is yes! it is supported for X4-2 as well.
If you are asking about the whole process , here is the link : Extending Oracle Exadata Database Machine

The versions of the compute node and the cell node that we added, were X7-2.

Note that, the newly added nodes had 18.1.0.0.0 image versions installed on them.  So we planned to upgrade the image versions of the existing nodes to 18.1.0.0.0, as it is recommended to use the same  image version for all the nodes of an Exadata machine.

We planned this upgrade, but the first thing that we needed to, was to install this nodes physically into the Exadata machine and today's blog post is specially about that.

Okay.. Let's take a look at what we have done for physically installing the nodes and building an Elastic Configuration.

We first took the new servers/nodes out of their boxes .
In order to attach the new nodes to the Exadata Rack, we installed server rack rails and server slide rails that come with these new nodes.
After installing the rails, we installed the cable arms/cable organizers into the new nodes.
After installing the rails and cable organizers, the new nodes became ready , so that we installed them into the Exadata Rack easily.

After physically installing these new servers, we first put the power cables.
Note that, we put 2 power cables into each node (high available) and we connected each of these cables into different PDUs (Power Distribution Unit) , PDU-1 and PDU-2.

We didn't installed the infiniband cables and left this work to be done in the image upgrade part of the work. On the other hand, we installed 2 SFP cards into the compute nodes. ( to be used for backups)

After these hardware related installation actions were taken, we connected to the new nodes using serial port. Using the serial port connection we configured ILOM net interfaces of these new nodes by executing the following commands;

set /SP/network pendingipdiscovery=static

set /SP/network pendingipaddress=<some_ip_address>

set /SP/network pendingipgateway=<gateway_ip_address>

set /SP/network pendingipnetmask=<netmask>

set /SP hostname=<somename-ilom>

set /SP/clients/ntp/server/1 address=<ntp_server_ip_address>

set /SP/clients/dns nameserver=<dns_server_1_ip>,<dns_server2_ip>

set /SP/network/ commitpending=true 

Next, we connected related network cables to the ILOM ports of these newly installed nodes and lastly, we powered these new nodes on and checked their connectivity.. (ILOM)