Reasons to upgrade to Enterprise Manager 13.2

By Sudip Datta-Oracle

Before, during and after the Open World, I have received numerous queries on the release of Enterprise Manager 13.2. This is an important release for Enterprise Manager 12c customers whose Premier Support expires this month and who traditionally wait for the release 2 of any product before upgrading, and for customers who have already upgraded to 13c, but want their critical issues addressed. And there are specific capabilities that are sought for by a specific set of customers, for example, security-sensitive customers have been asking for TLS 1.2 support. 

Se here we are, announcing the release of Enterprise Manager 13.2. The primary focus of this release was around security, scalability and availability of the platform. Some long pending requirements have been addressed in the release. First, comes the support for TLS1.2. The communication between the agent and OMS, the agent and the targets, and in case of target types such as database, between the OMS and the targets are now secure with TLS1.2 protocol. Second, Enterprise Manager 13.2 supports IPv6 addresses, allowing targets to be managed on IPv6-enabled hosts. Lastly, for ensuring higher availability of the Enterprise Manager platform, the "Always On" Monitoring feature has now been certified to run on a different host than the OMS.

Enterprise Manager 13.2 continues to improve upon the 13c theme of having a unified hardware and software management. The highlights in this area include better engineered systems and infrastructure management with the support for Exadata X6-2, X6-8 and Oracle VM 3.4 (and therefore the latest PCA models). Couple of other improvements in infrastructure management worth mentioning, are seamless ASR integration for hardware telemetry and Solaris Compliance checks.

Management of database and middleware platforms continues to evolve in this release. The fleet-maintenance feature, first introduced in 12cR5, can now support a wider range of database configurations, making patching really simple for cloud-scale environments. For Fusion Middleware, Enterprise Manager now supports Weblogic 12.2.x, enabling customers to enjoy the benefits of multitenancy for their Weblogic platform. Some of the benefits can also be enjoyed in a hybrid environment, as on-prem targets as well as DBCS, JCS and SOACS targets can be managed by a single Enterprise Manager instance.

Visit the OTN page to get more information on Enterprise Manager 13c.

By Sudip Datta, Oracle.