Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Released

The most comprehensive corporate management and monitoring solution is officially out - Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g. It just gets better and better.

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/enterprise-manager/index.html

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/index.html

As per the Oracle press release, highlights include:

Comprehensive Middleware Management: This release delivers enhanced support for managing Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, including full configuration management and provisioning for large-scale Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle WebLogic Server environments. Oracle WebLogic Server is often used in an “application grid” environment, or as the foundation for a private cloud. Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g can greatly simplify the management and provisioning of such deployments, including the private cloud.

New Database Management Capabilities: Providing full support for Oracle Database 11g Release 2, including compression, change detection, partitioning, diagnostics, and tuning. Oracle Exadata-aware SQL monitoring and I/O resource management for Oracle Exadata Version 2 is also featured.

Extensive Hardware, Virtualization and Operating System Management: Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, for managing Sun hardware and Oracle Solaris, covers the entire lifecycle of physical and virtual Sun environments including Oracle VM for SPARC (formerly known as Logical Domains or LDoms) and Solaris Containers, enabling customers to maximize the utilization of their Sun systems. As per Chung Wu from Oracle "We have delivered the first set of integration between Enterprise Manager Grid Control and Enterprise Manager Ops Center so that hardware level events can be centrally monitored via Grid Control."

Application Quality Management: New Oracle Application Testing Suite Release 9.1, automates test script generation based on real user actions; provides access to middleware diagnostics during load test to help identify performance bottlenecks; provides a new testing accelerator to simplify testing of applications based on Oracle ADF; and offers a new test starter kit for Oracle E-Business Suite R12 applications, to help reduce testing effort.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g also includes a new release 6.5 of Oracle Real User Experience for user experience management, Business transaction management with the ability to drill down to and monitor trasactions through IT tiers, and more powerful business service management. The catchword is Business Driven Application Management.

The integration with My Oracle Support is also enhanced. New components include::

Smart Configuration Management: Offers complete configuration lifecycle management and discovery with real-time change detection for compliance. It can simultaneously analyze millions of customer configurations and provide IT professionals with real-time notification of potential problems.

Automated Workflow: Enables the selection, validation and deployment of patches across the entire IT environment, allowing IT to help reduce the risk and effort needed to implement recommendations and fixes.

Community-Based Console: Facilitates best practice sharing and knowledge exchange with other members of the IT community.

One of the catchwords is also Integrated Application-to-Disk Management. This means complete management of the Oracle stack, including tools to manage Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle VM, and Oracle’s Sun Servers. This enables IT to quickly identify root cause and, in many cases, automatically resolve issues.

As per Chung Wu from Oracle "For composite and Java application management, two key pieces of technologies, JVM Diagnostic and Composite Application Monitoring and Modeler, are now fully integrated into Enterprise Manager so there is no need to install and maintain separate tools."

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/extensions/index.html now has a number of new Plug-Ins developed by partners to monitor third-party storage such as IBM, NEC, HP etc.

A complete list of new features can be seen on the newly released Enterprise Manager 11g documentation at this link:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E11857_01/em.111/e11982/whats_new.htm#CHDCIDIG

And of course Enterprise Manager 11g now uses Oracle WebLogic Server as its main engine, with all the technical benefits thereof.

This is indeed the new age of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g.

Interview posted

My friend Kamran Agayev in his series of "Exclusive Interviews with Top Oracle Experts"
just posted an interview with myself. (Of course that doesnt mean I am a top expert).
Please see:

http://kamranagayev.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/exclusive-interview-with-porus-homi-havewala/

New Recommended Bundle Patch (APR 2010) - 9405592 for Patch Automation on EM 10.2.0.5

New Recommended Bundle Patch 9405592 is available for download from My Oracle Support now. This patch primarily enhances the Patching functionality offered by Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control.
This patch is  cumulative and is a superset of the previously released bundles # 9132461, #8992470, and #8653501, and therefore, includes all the features that were introduced as part of those Recommended Bundle Patches.

For more information, refer to Comprehensive Overview of Recommended Bundle Patch 9405592 under
support note - OMS and Agent Patches required for setting up Provisioning, Patching and Cloning in 10.2.0.3 to 10.2.0.5 GC [ID 427577.1]

FAQ:
#1 If I had applied the previous recommended patches, do I need to rollback before applying this?
Yes, if you had applied any of the patches (# 9132461, #8992470 and #8653501) you would need to rollback the patch and apply this.  For rollback instructions, refer to the patch README from the support note 427577.1

#2 I recently applied the patch 9132461, do I still need the new patch?
The new patch contains additional bug fixes. (For more info see,Comprehensive Overview of Recommended Bundle Patch 9405592)
- Augmented Verification and Support for Oracle Database 9i Release 2 (9.2.0.8) and Oracle  Databases on Microsoft Windows Platform
- Bug fixes resolving issues with patching CPUs on Databases running on Windows platforms

- Key bug fixes identified at various customers.
Oracle strongly recommends you to apply the latest patch to make sure you do no encounter these issues and you are at the latest patch level for faster issue resolution through support.

#3 Can I apply this patch on top of PSU3 (9282397) for Enterprise Manager ?
Yes, this patch does NOT conflict with PSU3 and can be applied over it.

#4 Is there any known conflicts?
If you had applied the patch 8573971, it would conflict with this patch(9405592). You would need to rollback the patch 8573971 and apply this Bundle. Apply the overlay patch - 9583322  to get the fixes of the rolled back patch 8573971. Note: The overlay patch is currently unavailable, it will be made available in few days.

New Article on Oracle GoldenGate published

Friends,

I am pleased to announce a New article of mine has been published in April 2010
on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN):

Using Oracle GoldenGate for Real-Time Data Integration
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/havawala-goldengate.html

This article shows you how to install, set up, and configure Oracle GoldenGate to easily achieve seamless replication of data between Oracle Database 10g and 11g. The Enterprise Manager Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate is also described (Oracle GoldenGate Director).

Feedback I received recently from a DBA:

I read your article "Using Oracle GoldenGate for Real-Time Data
Integration" in oracle.com technology section.It was very interesting and
nicely documented. Thanks for writing good articles like this.

Regards,

Porus.