An environment family is a logical grouping of environments. The environment family
defines a set of characteristics that are shared across the environments to allow consistent
management and maintenance across your production, test, and development
environments.
Before you create an environment family, ensure that you have considered the following
options and how you want to set them up.
Selecting Applications to Include in an Environment Family
If your organization has purchased subscriptions for multiple applications across Oracle
Fusion Customer Experience (CX), Oracle Fusion Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and
Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM), you would typically provision all your
Fusion Applications in the same environment. To provision them in the same environment,
you add them all to the same environment family. However, if your business needs require
that you run specific subscriptions in different environments, you can create multiple
environment families to support those.
After you create an environment family, if you purchase a new subscription or add
applications to an existing subscription, you can update the environment family to
include the new applications.
Note
We highly recommend that you group all of your purchased Fusion Applications in a
single environment family. Sharing an environment family simplifies application
administration by allowing you to:
Share a common data model and objects across application modules, eliminating
the need for additional integrations.
Deploy and maintain your applications more easily by using a common setup,
development tools, and utilities.
Standardize business processes, including global deployment configuration and
extension.
Run consistent Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) reports and
analyses across all applications and functional modules.
Choosing a Region for an Environment Family 🔗
When you create an environment family, you select a geographical region where the
environments will be created. All the environments in a family are created in the region
selected for the environment family.
Things to consider when selecting a region:
The geographical location of your organization.
The geographical location of your customers. Be aware of data privacy laws that
might require customer data to be maintained within specific geographical
borders.
For information on how to enable more regions for your tenancy, see Managing Regions.
For information on how to change the region you are currently working in, see Switching Regions.
Choosing a Compartment 🔗
In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, a compartment is a logical grouping of resources for
controlling access to those resources. Placing resources in compartments allows you to
restrict access to as granular a level as you require.
For example, if your tenancy has multiple environment families, you can restrict access
to each family to different groups of users by placing them in different compartments.
You then write policy to allow access based on the group and compartment. If you don't
specifically choose a compartment (or if your organization has not set up multiple
compartments) the environment family will be created directly in the tenancy (also
called the root compartment). If your organization chooses to set up compartments later,
you can move the environment family to a different compartment.
Also, if you plan to have different administrators for your environment families and your environments, you can place each of them in different compartments to create different access policies for each. For more information about planning compartments, see Learn Best Practices for Setting Up Your Tenancy.
Understanding Environment Maintenance 🔗
Oracle automatically runs maintenance on your environments to apply feature updates and
patches to your applications, according to your maintenance policy schedule. During some
types of maintenance, the environment and all applications running on the environment
are not accessible during the maintenance window. Oracle notifies you in advance of
upcoming maintenance times. You can also get information about upcoming maintenance at any time on the environment
details page. You have options for choosing when and how often maintenance occurs in
your environments, although some applications have contractually mandated maintenance
schedules.
When you create an environment family, you define a maintenance policy for all the
environments in the family. Some aspects of the policy can be customized per
environment.
Types of Maintenance and Schedules 🔗
There are several types of maintenance that can occur on your environments. The following
sections describe the maintenance types and options.
Quarterly Maintenance Schedule 🔗
Oracle releases new features and major enhancements four times a year and applies them
in the quarterly update. These updates are mandatory for all customers and are applied
to your environment as per the quarterly maintenance months selected by you.
Scheduling Options
You can choose from the following three maintenance schedule options to receive these
updates:
January/April/July/October
February/May/August/November
March/June/September/December
Exception: Oracle Fusion Cloud Payroll has mandated maintenance periods in
February/May/August/November. If the environment family includes this service, you
can't change the maintenance months.
Monthly Patching 🔗
Monthly patching is an optional offering that you can choose. When you select monthly
patching, your environments receive bug fixes every month. The monthly patches are
applied in accordance with the patching cadence (production or non-production) that you
selected for the environment. Note that enabling monthly patching does not change the
delivery of new features. New features are delivered only in the quarterly updates.
Monthly patching updates include only bug fixes.
Enabling Concurrent Maintenance for All Environments 🔗
If you want all the environments in an environment family to follow the same patching cadence, you can set up concurrent maintenance for the environment family by editing the Patching cadence setting for each environment in the OCI
Console.
Concurrent maintenance can be useful in situations where your applications aren't yet live, and none of the environments are being used for actual production or mission-critical workloads.
The benefits of keeping all environments at the same update level (concurrent maintenance scheduling) are:
Updates are applied to all environments at the same time
Setup and extensibility and be easily migrated from a nonproduction environment to a production environment, because all environments are at the same update level
Environment refresh requests are easier to schedule and fulfill, because of the refresh requirement that source and target environments be at the same update level
To enable concurrent maintenance, set all environments to the same Patching cadence value (either "Production" or "Non-Production") in the OCI
Console. See To edit the maintenance schedule for instructions.
Important
We suggest that you don't use concurrent maintenance for an environment family if the family includes an environment that's supporting production or mission-critical workloads. For these environment families, we recommend setting only the production environment to the "Production" cadence, and all other test and development environments to the "Non-production" cadence.
Scheduling Details for Production and Non-Production Cadences
Non-Production: Environments set to this patching cadence receive updates on the weekend following the first Friday of the month, except in Middle East regions, which receive updates on the first Thursday of the month.
Production: Environments set to this patching cadence receive updates on the weekend following the third Friday of the month, except in Middle East regions, which receive updates on the third Thursday of the month.
Maintenance Start Times 🔗
The start time for quarterly maintenance runs is displayed in the OCI
Console on the environment family details page. To see the start time, click Maintenance (under Resources) when viewing the environment family details page, then look for the Maintenance start time field. The maintenance start time is the same for all environments in an environment family. The start time applies to both quarterly maintenance runs and optional monthly patching.
The Maintenance start time field is also displayed on the details page of each environment. Click Maintenance (under Resources) on the environment details page to see this field.
Changing the Maintenance Start Time for an Environment Family
You can request that Oracle change the maintenance start time for an environment family by opening a service request (SR) with Oracle Support. Changes are applied at the environment family level, and effect all environments in the environment family. After you open a service request, Oracle Support provides you with the available maintenance start times to choose from. After Oracle updates the maintenance start time, all maintenance runs happen at the new start time.
Maintenance Run Phases (Pre-Maintenance and Post-Maintenance) 🔗
Fusion Applications maintenance runs for both
quarterly and monthly patching follow a three-phase process to minimize downtime. The
OCI
Console displays messages throughout maintenance runs
that provide information about what phase the maintenance run is currently in.
At the beginning of your scheduled maintenance period, the Console displays a message letting you know that the
system is in the pre-maintenance phase. This lasts approximately two hours, and
precedes the maintenance downtime. During this period, certain Fusion Applications administrative tasks are
restricted, though your Fusion Applications remain
available.
The main phase of the maintenance run follows the pre-maintenance phase, and involves a
short period of downtime for your applications.
After the main maintenance phase, you see a message in the Console explaining that your environment is in the
post-maintenance phase. In this phase, your Fusion Applications are again available and the
maintenance run is completing. Certain Fusion Applications administrative tasks are still
restricted during the post-maintenance phase. Once the post-maintenance phase ends, your
maintenance run is complete and you are able to perform all administrative tasks in your
environment.
For more information on Fusion Applications
maintenance, see the following notes in My Oracle Support (MOS):
Oracle automatically notifies you by email to let you know about maintenance-related
activities, including the dates for next scheduled maintenance. You can expect email
notifications for the following:
30 days before the start of a maintenance event
7 days before the start of a maintenance event
End (completion) of maintenance
Extension of a maintenance window
Rescheduling of a maintenance event
Cancellation of a maintenance event
You can also view past notifications for your tenancy at any time in the Console. For
details on how to view announcements and notifications, see Viewing Announcements.
The default administrator of the tenancy has permissions to receive e-mail notifications.
You can enable others in your organization to receive e-mail notifications and view
announcements. See Enabling and Viewing Notifications for the setup steps.
Updates That Are Disabled Before and During Maintenance 🔗
Four days prior to scheduled maintenance, you can't make the following updates to an
environment:
Add an administrator
Add language packs
Add tags
Rename the environment
Update network access control lists
Update maintenance policy
Move the environment to a different compartment
Refresh the environment
If you try to make one of these updates, you'll get an error letting you know that the
environment is within the maintenance window. Wait until the scheduled maintenance is
complete to make these updates.
When maintenance is in progress, you'll see a banner across the details page of the
environment letting you know that updates are disabled until the maintenance completes.
Updating a Maintenance Policy 🔗
After you create an environment family, you can enable or disable monthly patching. You
can't change the quarterly maintenance schedule.