After you have an Oracle Database installation properly configured, tuned, patched, and tested, you may want to roll that exact installation out to other hosts.
Reasons to do this include the following:
You have multiple production database systems.
You want to create development and test systems that are identical to your production system.
Instead of installing, tuning, and patching on each additional host, you can clone your tested Oracle Database installation to other hosts, saving time and avoiding inconsistencies. There are two types of cloning available to you:
Cloning an Oracle home—Just the configured and patched binaries from the Oracle home directory and subdirectories are copied to the destination host and fixed to match the new environment. You can then start an instance with this cloned home and create a database.
You can use Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control to clone an Oracle home to one or more destination hosts. You can manually clone an Oracle home using a set of provided scripts and Oracle Universal Installer.
Cloning a database—The tuned database, including database files, initialization parameters, and so on, are cloned to an existing Oracle home (possibly a cloned home).
You can use Cloud Control to clone an Oracle database instance to an existing Oracle home.
