Well, today my post is that another important and useful utility which apps dba perform quite often i.e. Cloning Oracle Application 11i Instance. Cloning is the act of creating an identical copy of an already existing Oracle Applications system for Test/Development instances.
Simply copying all of the components from source to target system does not provide us a working Oracle Applications system, there are various configuration files that must be changed & for this purpose we do Cloning. Do keep in mind that the new system & the existing system must have same component versions & operating system type (You can’t clone from windows to linux or Solaris).
Performing Cloning prerequisites steps:
We need to perform certain prerequisites steps before cloning the source system:
STEP 1. Login as Applications file user & run the environment file.
STEP 2. We need to check certain software component versions:
(i) Check the version of perl, it should be atleast 5.005 or above.
To check perl version, Type the following command-
$ perl -v
Make sure that perl is included in the PATH (environment variable of user; echo $PATH).
(ii) Check the version of JRE & JDK which should be atleast 1.1.8 & 1.3.1 or above respectively. for this type:
$ java -version
(iii) Check the version of zip which should be atleast 2.3 or above.for this type :
$ zip
If you don’t have following versions, upgrade these software components as per the operating system.
STEP 3: It is recommendedto apply the latest AD Minipack & the latest AutoConfig Template patch as mentioned in the metalink note 230672.1 but not necessary.
STEP 4: Then we check whether latest Rapid Clone patch is there or not, for this we query the database whether latest Rapid Clone patch and other prerequisite patches as mentioned in the metalink document 230672.1 as follows:
$ select * from AD_BUGS where bug_number='number';
If it shows ” no rows selected ” that means you need to apply the patch. Do ensure that you apply all the patches as per the requirement.
STEP 5: If your system is autoconfig enable configure the application tier by running the adautocfg.sh script as follows:
$ cd $COMMON_TOP/admin/scripts/CONTEXT_NAME/
$adautocfg.sh
If your system is not autoconfig enable then set up the autoconfig on application tier with the help of metalink document 165195.1 ( Migrating to AutoConfig on the Applications Tier).
NOTE:
  • To check whether your system is AutoConfig enable or not , open any configuration file, if you see the text “This file is automatically generated by AutoConfig….”at the top,this mean your system is autoconfig enabled.
  • Also all the applications after 11.5.7 are autoconfig enabled.
STEP 6:Now we set up AutoConfig on the database tier. For this we need to copy AutoConfig to the RDBMS ORACLE_HOME as follows:
• login as Applmgr . Set up the environment file & create appsutil.zip file in AD_TOP by typing the following command:
$ perl $AD_TOP/bin/admkappsutil.pl
This creates appsutil.zip in the $APPL_TOP/admin/out directory.
• Now login as Oracle on the database tier & copy the appsutil.zip file to the and unzip it:
$ cd
$ cp $APPL_TOP/admin/out/appsutil.zip
$ unzip -o appsutil.zip (Option -o will overwrite any existing appsutil directory in database ORACLE_HOME)

Now run AutoConfig on the database tier:
$ cd /appsutil/scripts//adautocfg.sh
Don't forget to leave your comments if you have any confusion about this post from apps 11i.