The Hunger Site

Thursday, December 20, 2012

My new EM12c Book Now Available



Friends,

I am pleased to say that my new EM12c book has finally been published and is now available, both as a printed book and as an e-book. 

http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-enterprise-manager-12c-cloud-control/book
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Managing Data Center Chaos


This is the first published EM12c book in the world. 


Among the many positive comments I have received, a DBA says "yes,i have already bought a copy of the book. Its really good ....Thanks for publishing such a Good book on Enterprise Manager 12c."

Please have a look at the updated chapter of contents:

Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Chaos at Data Centers 
Chapter 2: Enter Oracle Cloud Control
Chapter 3: Ease the Chaos with Performance Management
Chapter 4: Ease the Chaos with Configuration Management and Security Compliance
Chapter 5: Ease the Chaos with Automated Provisioning
Chapter 6: Ease the Chaos with Automated Patching
Chapter 7: Ease the Chaos with Change Management
Chapter 8: Ease the Chaos with Test Data Management
Chapter 9: Ease the Chaos with Data Masking
Chapter 10: Ease the Chaos with Exadata Management
Chapter 11: Real-life Examples and Case Studies, and It's a Wrap: The Future is the Cloud
Index

Preface

Chapter 1: Chaos at Data Centers
Team effort
Common solutions used in data centers
Summary

Chapter 2: Enter Oracle Cloud Control
The Grid – where the cloud came from
Overview of version 12c
Striking new features in 12c
Bonus sections

Chapter 3: Ease the Chaos with Performance Management
Laying the foundation
Top activity
Testing infrastructure changes
SQL Monitoring
Doctor in the database
Real-Time ADDM
Compare Period ADDM
Active Session History (ASH) analytics
Summary

Chapter 4: Ease the Chaos with Configuration Management and Security Compliance
Lifecycle management
Auto discovery
Inventory
Detailed configuration
Search capability
History and compares
Topology
Custom configurations
Client configurations
Compliance
Compliance library
Configuration and compliance reporting
Summary

Chapter 5: Ease the Chaos with Automated Provisioning
Lifecycle management
First steps: Software Library
Provisioning library
Provisioning profiles
Deployment procedures
Customization
Lock down
Configuration details
Compliance standards
Granting permissions to the Provisioning Operator
Running EM as the Provisioning Operator
Running the procedure
Other possibilities
Summary

Chapter 6: Ease the Chaos with Automated Patching
Recommended patches
Patch plan
Out-of-place patching
Pre-patching analysis
Deployment
Plan template
Patching roles
Refreshes
Other patching procedures
Reporting
Summary

Chapter 7: Ease the Chaos with Change Management
Change management
Schema comparison
Schema Change Plan
Schema synchronization
Synchronization rules and mode
Synchronization results
Executing the synchronization
Synchronization without a Change Plan
Data comparison
Continuous comparison
Use cases
Summary

Chapter 8: Ease the Chaos with Test Data Management
Test Data Management
Creating packages
Creating the Application Data Model
Data subsetting
Applications
Table rules
Rule parameters
Space estimates
Pre/Post subset script
Generate subset
Benefits and capabilities
Summary

Chapter 9: Ease the Chaos with Data Masking
Finding sensitive data
Creating data masking definitions
New capabilities
Adding columns to mask
Defining the masking format
Advanced options
Generated Script
Scheduling the job
Testing the results
Format library
Benefits and capabilities
Summary

Chapter 10: Ease the Chaos with Exadata Management
Meeting the challenges
Discovering Exadata
Adding the hosts
Adding non-host targets
Adding the cluster and databases
Monitoring and managing Exadata
Database machine resource utilization
Exadata grid
Infiniband network
Database performance pages
Total capabilities
Summary

Chapter 11: Real-life Examples and Case Studies, and It's a Wrap: The Future is the Cloud
Case study – telecom
Case study – pharmaceutical
Case study – computer manufacturer
Case study – online store
Case study – financial institution
Case study – university
Future of cloud computing
Summary

Index


You can get the book via the Packt website, or, if you prefer Amazon, the Paperback version is available, or the Kindle version. Packt also has a PDF version.


Enjoy the world of Enterprise Manager.

Regards,

Porus.


Thursday, November 29, 2012

Latest List of Published White Papers and Articles

A number of my readers have asked me for a full list of all my published technical articles/white papers on the Oracle Technical Network (OTN), for easy reference. Here is the latest list as of January 2014. I have placed the white papers at the top, and the articles are in chronological order in the article list. The latest white paper and articles on Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c are included in the list. A couple of the earlier articles were even in the most popular OTN article list in 2009.


My Published White Papers on Oracle Technology Network (OTN)
White Paper: Advanced Uses of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g
White Paper: Managing Oracle Applications with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g
NEW!! White Paper: Advanced Uses of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c





Happy Reading!!

Monday, October 22, 2012

New Enterprise Manager Article published on Oracle Technical Network (OTN)


Friends,

I am pleased to announce that a new article of mine has been published in October 2012 on the Oracle Technical Network (OTN).

Ease the Chaos with Automated Patching
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/oem/havewala-patching-oem12c-1864147.html

This is excerpted from my new book "Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Managing Data Center Chaos", published by Packt Publishing. Enjoy the world of Enterprise Manager!!

Regards,

Porus.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Private Cloud: Putting some method behind the madness


By Sudip Datta on Oct 09, 2012

Finally, I decided to join the blogging community. And what could be a better time to start than the week after OpenWorld 2012. 50K+ attendees, demonstrations, speaker sessions and a whole lot of buzz on Oracle Cloud..It was raining clouds in this year's Openworld. I am not here to write about Oracle's cloud strategy in general, but on Enterprise Manager's cloud management capabilities. This year's Openworld was the first after we announced the 12c Cloud Control and we were happy to share the stage with quite a few early adopters. Stay tuned for videos from our customers and partners, I will post them as they get published.
I met a number of platform administrators in Oracle-DBAs, Middleware Admins, SOA Admins...The cloud has affected them all, at least to the point where it beckoned more than just curiosity..Most IT infrastructure are already heavily virtualized (on VMWare and on others including Oracle VM), and some would claim they are already on “cloud” (at least their Sysadmins told them so). But none of them were confident of the benefits because their pain points continued to grow.. Isn't cloud supposed to ease those? Instead, they were chasing hundreds of databases running on hundreds of VMs, often with as much certainty propounded by Heisenberg. What happened to the age-old IT discipline around administration, compliance, configuration management?
VMs are great for what they are. I personally think they have opened the doors to new approaches in which an application stack gets provisioned and updated. In fact, Enterprise Manager 12c is possibly the only tool out there that can provision full-fledged application as VM Assemblies. In this year's Openworld, customers talked on how they provisioned RAC and Siebel assemblies, which as the techies out there know, are not trivial (hearing provisioning time for Siebel down from weeks to hours was gratifying indeed). However, I do have an issue with a "one-size fits all" approach to cloud. In a week's span, I met several personas:
  • Project owners requiring an EC2 like VM instance for their projects
  • Admins needing the same for Sparc-Solaris.
  • DBAs requiring dedicated databases for new projects
  • APEX Developers needing just a ready-to-consume schema as a service
  • Java Developers looking for a runtime platform
  • QA engineers needing a fast clone of their production environment
If you drill down further, you will end up peeling more layers of the details. For example, the requirements for Load testing and Functional testing are very different. For Load testing the test environment should ideally be the same as the production. You shouldn't run production on Exadata and load test on a VM; they will just not be good representations of one another. For Functional testing it does not possibly matter.
DBAs seem to be at the worst affected of the lot. It seems they have been asked to choose between agile provisioning and  faster runtime performance. And in some cases, it is really a Hobson's choice, because their infrastructure provider made no distinction between the OLTP application and the Virtual desktop! Sad indeed. 
When one looks at the portfolio of services that we already offer (vanilla IaaS, VM Assembly based PaaS, DBaaS) or have announced (Java PaaS, Instant Cloning, Schema-aaS), one can possibly think that we are trying to be the "renaissance man" ! Well I would have possibly digested that had it not been for the various personas that I described above.
Getting the use cases right is very important for an application such as cloud management. We iterate and iterate over these over and over again and re-validate them in CABs (Customer Advisory Boards). We consider over the major aspects of tenancy: service placement, resource isolation (can a tenant execute an expensive SQL and run away with all the resources), quota and security. We, in Engineering, keep reminding ourselves that we are dealing with enterprise clouds. We owe it to our customer base !
In the coming posts, I will drill down more into each of the services. In the meanwhile, here are some collateral and  demos for starters with EM 12c.
Sudip Datta
(Senior Director of Product Management, Oracle Enterprise Manager)
The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.

HDFC Bank about their DBaaS Implementation in India


HDFC Bank in India (2nd largest private sector bank) went live recently on a combination of Exadata and Enterprise Manager 12c, to run their internal Databases as a Service (DBaaS) cloud. They were very successful in this venture and presented on the same at the recent Oracle Open World (OOW). You can download their very interesting presentation from either of the following links:

MediaFire:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/fc3tqpc9ek8etcc/HDFC_Bank_DBaaS_Presentation_in_OOW.pdf

Ge.tt:
http://ge.tt/8RwSqVP/v/0?c


The presentation speaks for itself. One of the main reasons for them to go the DBaaS way, was to increase business agility and the presentation is very effective in establishing the DBaaS solution as crucial to their agility. The drivers for DBaaS for them were:

- the need to be more agile as the business wants to launch new schemes all the time which require some changes to the DB / Application.

- each time they have to launch such a scheme, they have to create a copy of the DB and test the changes

- this takes time because setting up a DB from scratch takes some effort (not to mention expensive third-party SI resources which get charged to the bank of course, and human errors which can delay the test)

- this is a dynamic market where even a few days make a big difference so time to market is crucial

- such companies need a solution to provision databases on demand automatically for testing changes in the shortest possible time.

The Oracle DBaaS solution helps them cut the time from 56 days (if testing hardware is not ready available. It is 3.5 days even if h/w is available) to 3 hrs. This solution therefore saves critical Go To Market time in addition to reducing third-party SI costs, and improving hardware utilization. They have used the Cloud Management pack in EM12c to manage the DBaaS in addition to tracking usage by each department so that they can be charged for the use of the same.

This is a story that would impress most large companies that have a large number of databases and have to make frequent changes to them to be more agile. Let me know if you want more details.

I am pleased to say that 6 years ago, I had introduced Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control to the DBA team in HDFC Bank to set up their RMAN backups, and also demonstrated cloning of databases to them using Grid Control. Nilanjay of HDFC bank has graciously acknowledged that their Enterprise Manager journey started with me, all triggered post working with me 5-6 years back. Thanks Nilanjay for your graciousness.

The video of the OOW presentation by HDFC bank can now be seen on :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwe_11tNPRk

Regards,


Porus. 

Friday, September 28, 2012

Capacity Planning for the Cloud, and General Capacity Planning


A friend wrote " I could not find any information on capacity planning (database) in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. The only information i could get is that, it is part of the "Chargeback and Capacity Planning" plugin. There is no documentation available on this. One of my customer was using this feature in 10g and 11g.. and now have moved to 12c and are unable to figure it out.  Any pointers would be of great help."

My answer:

There is no capacity planner in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c right now. There is a consolidation planner. This is not a general capacity planning tool but rather a consolidation tool to access your current server workloads (CPU or memory or Network IO etc), and mathematically calculate if they can be consolidated to a physical or virtual consolidation target(s) that you specify. The SPECint benchmark is used in the case of CPU comparisons.

So far as the Chargeback and Capacity Planning Plugin that you mention, this does offer a view of the CPU and Memory etc TRENDS across the cloud infrastructure to the cloud administrator, so that the cloud admin can judge the capacity usage of the infrastructure and plan ahead for cloud infrastructure upgrades. So in that sense, it allows cloud capacity planning.,

Right now, metric historical data in EM 12c can be extracted and used for capacity planning by any customer in an external spreadsheet.

Regards,

Porus.
http://enterprise-manager.blogspot.com

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Oracle EM 12c Release 2 Now Available

Last week, on September 13 2012, Oracle announced general availability of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2. The release introduces unique capabilities for deploying and managing business applications in an enterprise private cloud, such as Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), enhanced business application management, and integrated hardware-software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Release 2 is now available on the OTN Download Page. This is the first major release since the EM 12c launch in October of 2011. This release contains many new features and enhancements in areas across the board. It is also the first ever Enterprise Manager release available on all platforms simultaneously.

Installation and Upgrade:
  • All major platforms have been released simultaneously (Linux 32 / 64 bit, Solaris (SPARC), Solaris x86-64, IBM AIX 64-bit, and Windows x86-64 (64-bit) )
  • Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2 is a complete release that includes both the EM OMS and Agent versions of 12.1.0.2.
  • Installation options available with EM 12.1.0.2: The user can do a fresh Install or an upgrade from versions EM 10.2.0.5, 11.1, or 12.1.0.2 ( Bundle Patch 1 not mandatory).
  • Upgrading to EM 12.1.0.2 from EM 12.1.0.1 is not a patch application (similar to Bundle Patch 1) but is achieved through a 1-system upgrade. 
Documentation:

New Capabilities and Features Increase Cloud Control: There are enhanced management capabilities for enterprise private clouds.Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 introduces new capabilities to allow customers to build and manage a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud based on Oracle WebLogic Server, including guided set up of a PaaS Cloud, self-service provisioning, automatic scale out, and metering and chargeback;

Enhanced lifecycle management capabilities for Oracle WebLogic Server enables synchronized patching and configuration file management to help ease management of multi-domain web environments;

Integrated hardware-software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud through features such as rack schematics visualization and integrated monitoring of all hardware and software components.

New management capabilities for business-critical applications include: A new Business Application (BA) target type and dashboard with flexible definitions provides a logical view of an application's business transactions, end-user experiences and the cloud infrastructure the monitored application is running on;

Oracle Real User Experience Insight has been enhanced to provide reporting capabilities on client-side issues for applications running in the cloud and has been more tightly coupled with Oracle Business Transaction Management to help ensure that real-time user experience and transaction tracing data is provided to users in context.

Several key improvements address ease of administration, reporting and extensibility for massively scalable cloud environments including dynamic groups, self-updateable monitoring templates, and bulk operations against many events, etc.

New and Revised Plug-Ins:

Several plug-Ins have been updated as a part of this release resulting in either new versions or revisions. 

Plug-In Name
Version
Enterprise Manager for Oracle Database
12.1.0.2 (revision)
Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware
12.1.0.3 (new)
Enterprise Manager for Chargeback and Capacity Planning
12.1.0.3 (new)
Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Applications
12.1.0.3 (new)
Enterprise Manager for Oracle Virtualization
12.1.0.3 (new)
Enterprise Manager for Oracle Exadata
12.1.0.3 (new)
Enterprise Manager for Oracle Cloud
12.1.0.4 (new)


Photos and Download PDF for Bangkok Customer and Partner Seminars on EM Cloud Control 12c


Friends,

Here are some photos on the EM Cloud Control 12c Overview/New Features seminar that we recently conducted in Bangkok, Thailand. The first day was for Oracle Partners, the second for Oracle Customers.

We covered the EM Cloud Control 12c Overview, Architecture, Database Lifecycle Management pack, Test Data Management pack, Oracle Cloud Overview, and New features of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c in all of these. We also spoke on the Diagnostics/Tuning packs and Data Masking packs.

The updated PDF can be downloaded from this Mediafire link:


This is the Oracle Customer Seminar Photo:




This is the Oracle Partner Seminar Photo:



Regards,

Porus.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Oracle Cloud Builder Summit—Your Fast Track to the Enterprise Private Cloud



Oracle customers are invited to the Oracle Cloud Builder Summit events happening across the region.  We’ll show them how to build—in only two hours—an enterprise cloud environment, as well as how to:
·       
  • Build and operate clouds
  • Efficiently consolidate onto shared, scalable cloud platforms and infrastructure
  • Secure and integrate clouds

This content-rich event will feature multiple demonstrations, customers will learn how to fast-track applications to cloud with Oracle, and support every aspect of planning, deploying, monitoring, and managing enterprise clouds.


I was "Ed" in the seminar in Jakarta, demonstrating how to build the cloud in two hours. I am going to be "Ed" again in Singapore. Have a look at the event schedule.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Bangkok, September 12: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Overview and New Features Workshop


If you are in Bangkok, Thailand on September 12, this is my upcoming seminar. Please register if you would like to attend. Totally free!!



Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Overview and New Features Workshop 
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
9:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Oracle Thailand
Conference Room 1 & 2

16th Floor, Ramaland Bldg,
952 Rama IV Road, Bangkok 10500
Overview
Join us for a very interesting Overview of the latest Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, including the recommended architecture for using Enterprise Manager, an explanation of the most popular EM capabilities, and a walkthrough of the Database Lifecycle Management pack which provides capabilities for database/ server/ OS configuration management, database provisioning and patch automation, and database change management (schema level changes and comparisons).

Attend this seminar to get an idea of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, including the new Test Data Management Pack (used for data subsetting). We will also touch on Oracle and the Cloud. We will go through, in detail, the New Features in the Cloud Control 12c version.

In all, this is a very well-rounded presentation on Enterprise Manager to give a solid idea of what this product is about. A Live Demo of the main features is included using Oracle’s Demonstration systems in the USA.

The seminar is conducted by Porus Homi Havewala, who is a Double Oracle Certified Master (OCM 10g &11g), Oracle ACE, and author of several popular OTN Articles and White papers, and also two popular books on Oracle Enterprise Manager. He has 18+ years of experience with Oracle technology and 26+ years in the IT industry.

Please see the link for further details.

Regards,

Porus.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Incident Management in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c


By Anand Akela on Jul 24, 2012

Contributed by Pete Sharman , Principal Product Manager, Oracle Enterprise Manager

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c (EM12c) is a huge release, both in terms of its adoption rate (that is, its uptake in the market) and the amount of functionality included in the product. For those of us that have been around for a long time, it’s very reminiscent of the massive functionality leap from Oracle RDBMS version 6 to version 7 – a quantum leap that makes it difficult to even grasp the breadth of the product now.
To try and make the new features a bit more understandable, I’ll be writing a number of blog entries over the coming months to highlight just some of my favourite new features for EM12c. From an administrator’s perspective, one of those standout features (and the subject of today’s entry) has to be incident management.
The goal of incident management is to enable administrators to monitor and resolve service disruptions that may be occurring in their data centre as quickly and efficiently as possible. Instead of managing the numerous discrete individual events that may be raised as the result of any of these service disruptions, we want to manage a smaller number of more meaningful incidents, and to manage them based on business priority across the lifecycle of those incidents.
To do this, Enterprise Manager now provides a centralized incident console called Incident Manager that will enable the administrator to track, diagnose, and resolve incidents, as well as providing features to help rectify the root causes of recurrent incidents. Incident Manager also directly leverages Oracle’s own expertise via My Oracle Support knowledge base articles and documentation to enable administrators to accelerate the process of diagnosing and resolving incidents and problems. Finally, Incident Manager also offers the ability to do lifecycle operations for incidents, so you can assign ownership of an incident to a specific user, acknowledge an incident, set priority for an incident, track an incident’s status, escalate an incident or suppress it so you can defer it to a later time. You can also raise notifications on an incident or open a helpdesk ticket via the helpdesk connectors.

Events

Enterprise Manager continues to be the primary tool for managing and monitoring the Oracle data center, so it manages and monitors Oracle applications as well as the application stack from presentation layer to middleware, databases to hosts and the operating system, as well as non-Oracle technology. When Enterprise Manager detects issues in any of this infrastructure, it raises events. Sample events might be:
1. Metric alerts (for example, CPU utilization or tablespace usage alerts) where a critical threshold you set has been crossed
2. Job events – events are raised by the job system for job statuses that you specify, for example an event is raised to signal the failure of a job. 
3. Standards violations – if you are using compliance standards and any of the targets that are being monitored violate any of the compliance standards, then a standards violation event could be raised.
4. Availability events – if a target is down and Enterprise Manager detects that, an availability event that the target is down can be raised
5. Other events – there are other types of events that occur as well
All these events signal particular issues have occurred in the managed data centre. As an administrator, you really want to be able to determine which of these events are significant. From these significant events, you then want to be able to correlate discrete events that are related to the same underlying issue, so you in fact have to manage a smaller number of significant incidents.

Incidents

An incident could then be defined as an object containing a significant event (such as a target being down, for example) or it could be a combination of events that all relate to the same issue (for example, running out of space could be detected by Enterprise Manager as separate events raised from the database, host and storage target types). For example, you may have a performance incident that amalgamates a number of performance events, another incident related to space, and a different incident based on availability problems.
Sound good? OK, so how do we do this? Well, events are significant occurrences in your IT infrastructure and that Enterprise Manager detects and raises. Each event has a set of attributes– what type of event it is, the severity (fatal, critical and so on), the object or entity on which the event is raised (typically a target but it can also be a job or some other object), the message associated with the event, the timestamp at which it occurred, as well as the functional category (such as availability, security etc.)
Some examples of the different types of events include:
· Target availability: raised when a target is down or has gone into an agent unreachable state.
· Metric alert: raised when a metric crosses its threshold.
· Job status change: raised, for example, when a job fails.
· Compliance standard rule: raised when a compliance standard rule is violated.
· Metric evaluation: raised when there is an error with the evaluation of a metric.
· Other events such as SLA Alert, High Availability and Compliance Standard Score violation can also be raised, and of course, users can cause an event to be raised.
Associated with these event types are event severities. The first of these, “Fatal”, is a new severity level in Enterprise Manager specifically associated with the target availability event type for when the target is down. Critical and warning events have the same meaning as they had in previous releases, and then we have the Advisory level. Typically, this is associated with non-service-impacting events such as compliance standard violation events. The informational level is an event severity used to indicate simply that an event has occurred, but there is no need to do anything about it.
As we discussed previously, an actual incident will contain one or more events. Let’s look at the details of an incident with one event. For example, Figure 1 shows us an availability event:
Figure 1: Incident with one event
The event signals that the database DB1 is down and includes a timestamp of when the event was raised. Because this is a target availability event and the database is down, the severity is marked as Fatal. An incident can be created for that event, so the incident contains only one event. In order to manage and track the resolution of the incident, the incident has other attributes such as owner (the Enterprise Manager user that is working on the incident), status, incident severity (which is based on the event severity), priority and a comment field.
Many incidents will instead contain multiple events, where those events are related and pointed to the same underlying cause. In the example shown in Figure 2, we have two metric alert events on a host target -- a memory utilization metric alert event and a CPU utilization metric alert event because the host is starting to suffer from heavy load. We have a warning severity memory utilization metric alert event, and a short time later a critical severity CPU utilization metric alert event. 

Figure 2: Incident with multiple events
An incident can be created containing both events in order to manage and track the resolution of the incident. In the current release, the administrator needs to manually combine events into an incident in the Enterprise Manager console (the automatic grouping of related events into an incident is a future enhancement). Again, we have additional attributes associated with the incident like we had in the previous example. Enterprise Manager automatically assigns the incident severity, based on the worst case event severity of all the events contained in the incident. Since the worst event severity is Critical, the incident severity is also set to Critical. Finally, the incident has a summary which is a short description of what the incident is about. The individual events are indicating the machine load is high so you can set the summary to that. Alternatively, you can set the incident summary to be the same as the event messages.
If you are using one of the helpdesk connectors to interface to a helpdesk system, an incident might also result in a helpdesk ticket which can allow the helpdesk analyst to work on the ticket. Within Enterprise Manager, we’ll be able to track both the ticket number and the status of that particular ticket.

Problems

A problem is the underlying root cause of an incident. In Enterprise Manager terms, a problem is specifically related to either an Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR) incident or Oracle software incident. Enterprise Manager will automatically create a problem whenever it detects an ADR incident has been raised. An ADR incident can be thought of as a critical Oracle software problem where the resolution of the software problem typically involves contacting Oracle Support, opening a service request and possibly receiving a patch for that problem.
Whenever an ADR incident is raised, we generate one incident in Enterprise Manager for that ADR incident, and we also automatically generate a problem as well. All the ADR incidents that have the same problem signature (that is, the same root cause) will be linked into a single problem object. The administrator can manage the problem in Incident Manager in the same way as you would manage an incident, so you can assign an owner to the problem, track the resolution and so on. In addition, there are in-context links to Support Workbench functionality which allows the administrator to package the diagnostic material, open a service request and view the status of diagnostic activity such as the SR number and ultimately bug number (if one is generated) within the user interface.
Figure 3 shows a diagrammatic example of how incidents and problems are related. Two ADR incidents have occurred, in this example two ORA-600 errors have occurred in my database. Both of these incidents are of critical severity. Enterprise Manager automatically creates a problem containing those incidents. Within the Incident Manager interface you can link to the Support Workbench to open a service request which you can then track from Incident Manager.
Figure 3: Incidents and problems
So now you have an understanding of the terminology and relationships between these terms, what’s next? Well, the next thing to understand is just how you deal with these incidents. That will be the topic of my next post, so stay tuned for more!
Contributed by Pete Sharman , Principal Product Manager, Oracle Enterprise Manager

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Photos and Download PDF for Manila seminars on EM Cloud Control 12c



Friends,

Here are some photos on the EM Cloud Control 12c Overview/New Features seminar that I recently conducted in Manila, Philipines. The first day was for Oracle Partners, the second for Oracle Customers.

We covered the EM 12c Overview, Architecture, Database Lifecycle Management pack, Test Data Management pack, Oracle Cloud Overview, and New features of Enterprise Manager 12c in all of these. We also spoke on the Diagnostics/Tuning packs and Data Masking packs.

The updated PDF can be downloaded from this Mediafire link:

http://www.mediafire.com/?l25h2chvyv3ocvc


Oracle Customer Seminar Photo:



Oracle Partner Seminar Photos:





Regards, 

Porus.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Manila, July 25: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Overview and New Features Workshop



http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=155824&src=7599523&src=7599523&Act=20 

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Overview and New Features Workshop 
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
09:30 a.m. – 01:00 p.m. 

Oracle Philippines
Conference Room 1 & 2

19th Floor, Pacific Star Building,
Senator Gil J. Puyat corner Makati Avenues,
Makati City, Metro Manila 1200 

Overview
Join us for a very interesting Overview of the latest Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, including the recommended architecture for using Enterprise Manager, an explanation of the most popular EM capabilities, and a walkthrough of the Database Lifecycle Management pack which provides capabilities for database/ server/ OS configuration management, database provisioning and patch automation, and database change management (schema level changes and comparisons). 

Attend this seminar to get an idea of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, including the new Test Data Management Pack (used for data subsetting). We will also touch on Oracle and the Cloud. We will go through, in detail, the New Features in the Cloud Control 12c version.

In all, this is a very well-rounded presentation on Enterprise Manager to give a solid idea of what this product is about. A Live Demo of the main features is included using Oracle’s Demonstration systems in the USA.

The seminar is conducted by Porus Homi Havewala, who is a Double Oracle Certified Master (OCM 10g &11g), Oracle ACE, and author of several popular OTN Articles and White papers, and also two popular books on Oracle Enterprise Manager. He has 18+ years of experience with Oracle technology and 26+ years in the IT industry. 

Please see the link for further details.

Regards,

Porus.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

New EM 12c plug-ins


Announcing the release of following EM 12c plug-ins:

·      Enterprise Manager for Microsoft Active Directory
·      Enterprise Manager for Microsoft Biz Talk Server
·      Enterprise Manager for Microsoft .Net Framework
·      Enterprise Manager for Microsoft IIS


12.1.0.1.0 version of these plug-ins are being released for the first time, on top of 12c Framework. These are certified to work with 12101/12101BP1 Platform and require Windows Agent. The new plug-ins are now available from self-update.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Database-as-a-Service on Exadata Cloud


Database-as-a-Service on Exadata Cloud

Note – Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c DBaaS is platform agnostic and is designed to work on Exadata/non-Exadata, physical/virtual, Oracle/non Oracle platforms and it’s not a mandatory requirement to use Exadata as the base platform.
Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is an important trend these days and the top business drivers motivating customers towards private database cloud model include constant pressure to reduce IT Costs and Complexity, and also to be able to improve Agility and Quality of Service. The first step many enterprises take in their journey towards cloud computing is to move to a consolidated and standardized environment and Exadata being already a proven best-in-class popular consolidation platform, we are seeing now more and more customers starting to evolve from Exadata based platform into an agile self service driven private database cloud using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c.

Together Exadata Database Machine and Enterprise Manager 12c provides industry’s most comprehensive and integrated solution to transform from a typical silo’ed environment into enterprise class database cloud with self service, rapid elasticity and pay-per-use capabilities.

In today’s post, I’ll list down the important steps to enable DBaaS on Exadata using Enterprise Manager 12c. These steps are chalked down based on a recent DBaaS implementation from a real customer engagement -
  • Project Planning - First step involves defining the scope of implementation, mapping functional requirements and objectives to use cases, defining high availability, network, security requirements, and delivering the project plan. In a Cloud project you plan around technology, business and processes all together so ensure you engage your actual end users and stakeholders early on in the project right from the scoping and planning stage.
  • Setup your EM 12c Cloud Control Site – Once the project plan approval and sign off from stakeholders is achieved, refer to EM 12c Install guide and these are some important tips to follow during the site setup phase -
    • Review the new EM 12c Sizing paper before you get started with install
    • Cloud, Chargeback and Trending, Exadata plug ins should be selected to deploy during install
    • Refer to EM 12c Administrator’s guide for High Availability, Security, Network/Firewall best practices and options
    • Your management and managed infrastructure should not be combined i.e. EM 12c repository should not be hosted on same Exadata where target Database Cloud is to be setup
  • Setup Roles and Users – Cloud Administrator (EM_CLOUD_ADMINISTRATOR), Self Service Administrator (EM_SSA_ADMINISTRATOR), Self Service User (EM_SSA_USER) are the important roles required for cloud lifecycle management. Roles and users are managed by Super Administrator via Setup menu –> Security option. For Self Service/SSA users custom role(s) based on EM_SSA_USER should be created and EM_USER, PUBLIC roles should be revoked during SSA user account creation.
  • Configure Software Library – Cloud Administrator logs in and in this step configures software library via Enterprise menu –> provisioning and patching option and the storage location is OMS shared filesystem. Software Library is the centralized repository that stores all software entities and is often termed as ‘local store’.
  • Setup Self Update – Self Update is one of the most innovative and cool new features in EM 12c framework. Self update can be accessed via Setup -> Extensibility option by Super Administrator and is the unified delivery mechanism to get all new and updated entities (Agent software, plug ins, connectors, gold images, provisioning bundles etc) in EM 12c.
  • Deploy Agents on all Compute nodes, and discover Exadata targets – Refer to Exadata discovery cookbook for detailed walkthrough to ensure successful discovery of Exadata targets.
  • Configure Privilege Delegation Settings – This step involves deployment of privilege setting template on all the nodes by Super Administrator via Setup menu -> Security option with the option to define whether to use sudo or powerbroker for all provisioning and patching operations.
  • Provision Grid Infrastructure with RAC Database on Compute Nodes – Software is provisioned in this step via a provisioning profile using EM 12c database provisioning. In case of Exadata, Grid Infrastructure and RAC Database software is already deployed on compute nodes via OneCommand from Oracle, so SSA Administrator just needs to discover Oracle Homes and Listener as EM targets. Databases will be created as and when users request for databases from cloud.
  • Customize Create Database Deployment Procedure – the actual database creation steps are "templatized" in this step by Self Service Administrator and the newly saved deployment procedure will be used during service template creation in next step. This is an important step and make sure you have locked all the required variables marked as locked as ‘Y’ in this table.
  • Setup Self Service Portal – This step involves setting up of zones, user quotas, service templates, chargeback plan. The SSA portal is setup by Self Service Administrator via Setup menu -> Cloud -> Database option and following guided workflow. Refer to DBaaS cookbook for details. You also have an option to customize SSA login page via steps documented in EM 12c Cloud Administrator’s guide
  • Final Checks – Define and document process guidelines for SSA users and administrators. Get your SSA users trained on Self Service Portal features and overall DBaaS model and SSA administrators should be familiar with Self Service Portal setup pieces, EM 12c database lifecycle management capabilities and overall EM 12c monitoring framework.
  • GO LIVE – Announce rollout of Database-as-a-Service to your SSA users. Users can login to the Self Service Portal and request/monitor/view their databases in Exadata based database cloud.
    Congratulations! You just delivered a successful database cloud implementation project!
    In future posts, we will cover these additional useful topics around database cloud –
    • DBaaS Implementation tips and tricks – right from setup to self service to managing the cloud lifecycle
    • ‘How to’ enable real production databases copies in DBaaS with rapid provisioning in database cloud
    • Case study of a customer who recently achieved success with their transformational journey from traditional silo’ed environment on to Exadata based database cloud using Enterprise Manager 12c.
    More Information –

    Disclaimer

    Opinions expressed in this blog are entirely the opinions of the writers of this blog, and do not reflect the position of Oracle corporation. No responsiblity will be taken for any resulting effects if any of the instructions or notes in the blog are followed. It is at the reader's own risk and liability.

    Blog Archive