Enterprise Manager Agent Deployment gets better on Windows

Dear Readers,

In Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4, released in June 2014, agent deployment on Windows just got better. In earlier versions, Cygwin was often used as the mechanism for an EM agent install on Windows target servers via a Push from the Oracle Management Service (OMS). This is no longer necessary.

The Push method is the most popular method for EM agent install, and uses standard protocols like SSH1 or SSH2 (offered by OpenSSH) on Unix systems.  However, for the Windows platform, the Push method used the capabilities of Cygwin. This software had to be installed separately, and was often a bone of contention with Windows administrators who did not prefer this Linux-like software to be installed on their Windows systems.

In EM12c Release 4, there is now an alternative. The PSExec software can be used for EM Agent pushes. This is a light-weight telnet replacement and is a part of Microsoft Windows Sysinternals software – have a look at this Microsoft link.

If your central EM12c OMS is already on Windows, then you can deploy the PSExec software on the OMS server itself, it takes less than a few minutes to deploy. If your OMS is not on Windows and you want to deploy the Windows EM agent to multiple Windows targets, then you need a staging Windows server on which PSExec can be deployed.  This deployment is a one-time activity. The PSExec software is not required on any target Windows server.

The step-by-step instructions for both these scenarios can be found in the EM Basic Installation guide at this link. A script to deploy agents using PSExec (agentDeployPsExec.bat) has also been made available, see MOS Note 1636851.1 . As per the note, this agentDeployPsExec.bat file works for both 12.1.0.3 /12.1.0.4 OMS. A response file is used along with this script for automatically inputting the information for agent installation, such as the host name, agent base directory, and so on.

In this way, EM agents can be installed seamlessly on multiple Windows targets, and in considerably lesser time than the time that was required for Cygwin setup and agent deployment. And it also makes a lot of Windows administrators happy, that they do not have to install Cygwin if they use the PSExec approach. This looks like another great enhancement in EM12c Release 4 by Oracle.

This blog post was originally posted at this link.

Regards,

Porus.