Expanding the Partner Ecosystem with Third-Party Plug-ins

By Joe Diemer

Oracle Enterprise Manager’s extensibility capabilities are designed to allow customers and partners to adapt Enterprise Manager for management of heterogeneous environments with Plug-ins and Connectors.  Third-party developers continue to take advantage of Oracle Enterprise Manager’s Extensibility Development Kit (EDK) to build plug-ins to Enterprise Manager 12c, such as F5’s BIG IP Plug-in and Entuity’s Eye of the Storm Network Management Plug-In.  Partners can also validate their plug-ins through the Oracle Validated Integration (OVI) program, which assures customers that the plug-in has been tested and is functionally and technically sound, is designed in a reliable and standardized manner, and operates and performs as documented.

Two very recent examples of partners which have beta versions of their plug-ins are Blue Medora's VMware vSphere plug-in and the NetApp Storage plug-in. 


VMware vSphere Plug-in by Blue Medora
Blue Medora, an Oracle Partner Network (OPN) “Gold” member, just announced that it is now signing up customers to try a beta version of their new VMware vSphere plug-in for Enterprise Manager 12c.  According to Blue Medora, the vSphere plug-in monitors critical VMware metrics (CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, etc) at the Host, VM, Cluster and Resource Pool levels.  It has minimal performance impact via an “agentless” approach that requires no installation directly on VMware servers.  It has discovery capabilities for VMware Datacenters, ESX Hosts, Clusters, Virtual Machines, and Datastores.  It offers integration of native VMware Events into Enterprise Manager, and it provides over 300 VMware-related health, availability, performance, and configuration metrics.  It comes with more than 30 out-of-the-box pre-defined thresholds and can manage VMware via a series of jobs split between cluster, host and VM target types.

The company reports that the Enterprise Manager 12c plug-in supports vSphere versions 4.0, 4.5 and 5.0.  Platforms supported include Linux 64-bit, Windows, AIX and Solaris SPARC and x86.  Information about the plug-in, including how to sign up for the beta, is available at their web site at http://bluemedora.com after selecting the "Products" tab.


NetApp Storage Plug-in
NetApp, also an OPN member, believes the combination of storage system monitoring with comprehensive management of Oracle systems with Enterprise Manager will help customers reduce the cost and complexity of managing applications that rely on NetApp storage and Oracle technologies.  So, NetApp built a plug-in and reports that it has comprehensive availability and performance information for NetApp storage systems.  Using the plug-in, Oracle Enterprise Manager customers with NetApp storage solutions can track the association between databases and storage components and thereby respond to faults and IO performance bottlenecks quickly. With the latest configuration management capabilities, one can also perform drift analysis to make sure all storage systems are configured as per established gold standards.
The company is also now signing up beta customers, which can be done at the NetApp Communities site by clicking HERE.


Learn More about Enterprise Manager Extensibility
More plug-ins from other partners are soon to come, which I'll be reporting on them here.  To learn more about Enterprise Manager and how customers and partners can build plug-ins using the EDK to manage a multi-vendor data center, go to http://oracle.com/enterprisemanager in the Heterogeneous Management solution area.  The site also lists the plug-ins available with information on how to obtain them.  More info about the Oracle Validated Integration program can be found at the OPN Enterprise Manager Knowledge Zone in the "Develop" tab.

Photos and Download PDF for Jakarta 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 Jakarta, Indonesia. 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 12c in all of these. The updated PDF can be downloaded from this Mediafire link:

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

Oracle Partner Seminar Photo:

Oracle Customer Seminar Photo:

Regards,

Porus.

Jakarta June 20th: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Overview and New Features Workshop

If you are in Jakarta on June 20th, this is my upcoming seminar. Please register if you can attend.

http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=155814&src=7599523&src=7599523&Act=16

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Overview and New Features Workshop
Wednesday, June 20, 2012

10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Oracle Indonesia
Rinjani Room
Sentral Senayan 1, Office Tower,
9/F, Jl. Asia Afrika, No. 8
Jakarta 10270, Indonesia

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.

New ROI and Cost Comparison studies

Forrester Consulting: Oracle Real Application Testing Delivers 224% ROI

Forrester Consulting conducted a multi-customer study revealing customers gain significant benefits and cost savings from Oracle Real Application Testing, an Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition option.  Please go to this  Oracle.com page to download the Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact^TM of Oracle Real Application Testing study.

Cost Comparison Whitepapers: Oracle Database 11g’s Industry-Leading Manageability Significantly Lowers Operational Management Costs

Once again Oracle Database 11g continues to outperform IBM, Microsoft and SAP Sybase with its self-manageability, delivering the industry’s best performance and availability. These cost comparison studies show how Oracle Database 11g takes less time and effort to manage helping you save more in database administrator productivity per year compared to other databases. Here are the IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAP Sybase cost comparison studies so you can see the clear benefits of choosing Oracle Database 11g and its manageability using Enterprise Manager.

How Enterprise Manager helps with PeopleSoft Management

How Enterprise Manager helps with PeopleSoft management. 

1.       The Enterprise Manager AMS Suite for PeopleSoft shows a topology of all PeopleSoft components,  including the PS App Server, PS Web Server, PS Process Scheduler, PS App Database and so on. All these components are monitored as per warning and critical thresholds and alerts will be raised if thresholds are crossed. The Topology view uses Root Cause Analysis to test each component and highlight in red the component that has failed. For example, a PeopleSoft system can be down just because a small component like the listener is down, which prevents connection to the database. Root Cause Analysis pinpoints the failed listener and the DBAs can fix quickly. You are back in business, faster.

2.       PeopleSoft Domain Administration can be centralized, with the ability to create and configure domains, and PeopleSoft Process Scheduler Management can be performed through Enterprise Manager. The PeopleSoft Admin can centrally access all logs on all servers to aid in trouble shooting, and can centrally purge or archive logs. All this reduces admin time and makes the PeopleSoft Admin have improved productivity.

3.       Configuration of various PeopleSoft components can be compared to vastly aid in trouble-shooting and there is an audit-trail of all changes to PeopleSoft systems, which allows you to enforce configuration and security compliance. There is change tracking of PeopleSoft System Parameters so more security.

4.       Real user monitoring of the PeopleSoft application can be performed to pinpoint the slowest pages or modules and the real life experience of the users can be understood. This reduces the problem resolution time of the issues reported by end users. More user satisfaction.

      

     Regards,

      Porus. 

Cloud Control 12c released for Windows 64-bit

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 1 (12.1.0.1) for Windows x86-64 (64-bit) has been released:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/enterprise-manager/downloads/oem-windows64-download-1619155.html

Notes from EM Product Management:

EM12c OMS is now supported on Windows x64 and the EM12c agents can be deployed on Windows x64, Windows 32 and zLinux. The software is available for download on OTN and EM Store (Self-update). A few tips:

1   1.   You should use the OTN download link only if you want to install the EM12c OMS on Windows. If you have an existing EM12c OMS running on Linux, the new agent image will be available to you through the EM12c self-update functionality.

     2. Please note that the Windows port already includes BP1. So if you do a brand new install of OMS on Windows, you already have all the BP1 fixes. On other platforms (e.g. Linux), you will either need to have a BP1 environment available to apply the Windows update or you will have to undertake the process of applying the BP1 update as a part of the Windows update process (i.e. apply the BP1 update first on your existing non-Windows OMS).

-   

       3. You will need to apply some patches on the Linux EM12c OMS before you can push the new agents and  monitor targets on the above three platforms. See the guide below for details. 

-     4. Also, if you are thinking of starting a new update from EM 10g/11g, please download the latest version of the Pre-Upgrade Console patches. See the guide below for details. 

The details are in the BP1 application guide. Please see the BP1 workbook which has been revised for the Windows update and is now part of the doc library.

A quick update: the SQL Server plug-in is now also available via self-update.

Courtesy, EM Product Management.

Regards,

Porus.

My New Book on Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c

Dear Friends,

I am happy to announce my new book on Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, published by a different Publisher PACKT, will be available in September 2012. 

You can pre-order now. Electronic copies will be available too. This reached the HOT pre-order list on their site very soon after announcement.

http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-enterprise-manager-12c-cloud-control/book

Thanks to all my readers who have encouraged me to write this book. This will be my second book on Enterprise Manager and is totally rewritten for the new version, and has a totally different publisher from the previous one.


A lot of topics have been covered, including Database Diagnostics/Tuning, Database Lifecycle Management Pack, Data Masking, Data Subsetting, and so on. Its going to be a great primer for the new EM 12c. I have even included Exadata Management with EM12c.


On the theme of Managing Data Center Chaos, I have introduced the reader to a number of Enterprise Manager capabilities. Database LifeCycle Management includes Configuration Management, Security Compliance, Provisioning, Patching and Schema Change Management. I have also included Test Data Management (Data Subsetting), Data Masking, as well as managing Exadata with Enterprise Manager. Please note this is a list of probable topics that will be included and is not final. When the book is published, the final chapter of contents will be seen.

Regards,

Porus.