It has been a little more than a year, since we released our first cloud
management features as a part of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. As
customers started adopting our solution for a broad spectrum of
workloads including production, QA, and development needs, we gained
invaluable experience into the various use cases and requirements. Based
on that experience, Oracle has released new and updated Management
Plug-ins that precisely address the above requirements, ultimately
leading to faster time-to-market for IT services delivery. In addition
to providing enhanced cloud management support, the plug-ins extend
Enterprise Manager's capabilities for Database as a Service (DBaaS) and
Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), as well as introduce new features
for Testing as a Service (TaaS). See "New Plug-in Features" below for
additional details.
NEW PLUG-IN FEATURES:+ Database as a Service (DBaaS): A sophisticated Database as a Service solution needs to cater to a variety of use cases:
• A developer or a project owner requiring a new database service with or without seed data
• QA requiring a full database refresh for intense load testing
• QA requiring to create multiple clones for functional testing on subset of data
The
current release of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c offers
new capabilities and support for managing database cloud services in all
the above cases. It comes with out-of-box capabilities such as
schema-as-a-service for extreme database consolidation and database
cloning through Snap Clone or RMAN Backups. These capabilities provide
an optimum utilization of development and database resources, giving
customers more flexibility and control in managing the database
lifecycle.
While some applications need dedicated databases,
small home-grown applications can often share the database instance with
other applications.
Schema as a Service allows DBAs to
consolidate multiple applications in the same database and offer logical
slices of database to the end-users such as developers, thereby
preventing database sprawl. They can enforce certain performance
guarantee to these services by leveraging database Resource Manager,
which prevents a particular user over-consuming the underlying compute
resources. End-users can therefore request schema services from the
self-service application without stepping on one another. Schema as a
Service significantly reduces the administrative and maintenance
overhead since only a limited number of such databases need to be
managed and patched.
Cloning databases got significantly easier
with the new plug-in. A new feature called “Snap Clone” really makes it
snappy (terabytes of data can be cloned in a matter of minutes). The
feature helps clone a database by leveraging the underlying “Copy on
Write” technology offered by storage technologies, such as Netapp and
ZFS Storage Appliance. DBAs can set up a “test master” database by
refreshing a production database and mark the “test master” as the
source of functional clones. Self-service users can create multiple
copies of the test-master in minutes without consuming additional space
beyond what’s needed to make localized updates. This can be really
beneficial for applications where the testing is primarily read-only and
is limited to a subset of the data. Users can also take backups
(snapshots) of their database and “time travel” across snapshots to
restore the database to an earlier incarnation in a matter of minutes.
For
more involved testing, such as testing production loads with lots of
updates, Oracle Enterprise Manager also supports a full clone using the
RMAN technology.
The following picture highlights the various use cases of DBaaS that Oracle Enterprise Manager addresses.
While each of these have specific applicability, Oracle Enterprise Manager handles all these use cases comprehensively.
+ Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Oracle Enterprise
Manager Cloud Control 12c has added support for building and managing
Infrastructure as a Service clouds based on the latest Oracle VM 3.2.1
release. The updated kernel and enhanced storage management features in
Oracle VM 3.2.1 make it an ideal foundation for building a secure,
scalable, enterprise-class infrastructure cloud. The newly released
Oracle Enterprise Manager Management Plug-ins for Oracle Virtualization
and Oracle Cloud provide comprehensive support for setting up the cloud
infrastructure, deploying Oracle virtual assemblies and Oracle VM
templates, and monitoring and managing the health of the cloud.
+ Testing as a Service (TaaS): Any enterprise application
needs extensive testing before changes are rolled into production.
Testing is a time-consuming process, can take weeks owing to delays in
provisioning the full application stack to run the test on. QA is often
left waiting on IT to provide the infrastructure and platform and
sometimes this wait itself can account for 50% of the total testing
cycle. Currently, no integrated solution exists that handle the
provisioning and testing phases of the overall testing process leading
to significant process delays and poor efficiency.
Oracle
Enterprise Manager 12c introduces Testing as a Service, a new cloud
platform for delivering automated application testing services. A
self-service solution designed for private clouds, TaaS orchestrates the
testing process end-to-end by automating provisioning of complete test
labs (applications, test tools and assets comprising scripts and
scenarios), execution of load and functional tests and rich application
monitoring and diagnostics. It also includes a sophisticated chargeback
facility and the ability to perform deeper diagnostics in context of
testing.
TaaS makes it possible to significantly reduce testing
time and costs without compromising quality, and enables organizations
to be more agile in delivering critical business applications. One can
find more details on TaaS
here.
Oracle Enterprise Manager’s cloud management features are also
enabled through a set of powerful RESTful APIs, which are summarized in
this presentation.
These APIs can be consumed from custom or 3rd party orchestration
frameworks. In the new release, one can also orchestrate these APIs
using an Oracle Enterprise manager provided framework called Blueprints.
Using Blueprints, one can orchestrate the provisioning of a
multi-layered application (such as the one shown below). One can
download the documentation and sample code for the blueprints from
here.
+ New Management Plug-Ins: The following new
and updated plug-Ins are now available as part of this release. In
addition to providing new and enhanced functionality as mentioned above,
the plug-ins incorporate numerous bug fixes.
Plug-In Name / Version*Enterprise Manager for Oracle Database (DB) 12.1.0.3 (new)
*Enterprise Manager for Oracle Virtualization (VT) 12.1.0.4 (new)
*Enterprise Manager Storage Management Framework (SMF) 12.1.0.1 (new)
*Enterprise Manager for Oracle Cloud (SSA) 12.1.0.5 (new)
Read More:* New book:
Building and Managing a Cloud Using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c (Oracle Press)*
Cloud Management page on OTN *
Enterprise Manager 12c: Cloud Management Pack for DB Datasheet *
Enterprise Manager 12c: The Nerve Center of Oracle Cloud Technical White Paper
