Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c Release 3 (13.3.0.0) Upgrade

A few months ago I wrote about the installation and upgrade Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c Release 3 (13.3.0.0).

At the time I did a clean install and an example upgrade from 13.2 to 13.3. The idea behind the upgrade was basically to practice what I needed to do at work.

Just before I left for OpenWorld I got our virtualization folks to give me a clone of the production Cloud Control VM and I ran a practice upgrade on that. It’s important to do a “real” run through, as sometimes you hit issues you don’t see when upgrading from a clean installation of the previous version. In the past the upgrade of the clean installation of the previous version has worked fine, but the real upgrade failed the prerequisite checks as some of the agents or plugins were too old. The latest test on the clone worked fine, so we had the green light to do the production upgrade.

Post OOW18, my first job on returning to work was to get Cloud Control upgraded. I repeated the process I had done on the clone and it went fine.

In a funny coincidence, while I was doing the upgrade someone retweeted the blog post from a few months ago. Weird.

As a reminder, here are the 13.3 articles.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c Release 3 (13.3.0.0) : Installation & Upgrade

Cloud Control 13c (13.3) was released a few days ago, but from what I can see the documentation hasn’t been made available yet (see update). Despite this I had a go at installing it using the instructions for 13.2, and with a couple of small exceptions it was similar, which wasn’t surprising. The upgrade from 13.2 to 13.3 was similar to the previous upgrade from 13.1 to 13.2 also.

I’ve added a couple of articles to the website.

These articles are in no way a replacement for reading the manuals (if there were any), but it will hopefully give you a feel for how easy it can be to get going with Cloud Control.

For the installation article I did the basic setup of the box and the DB using Vagrant. You can repeat the build using my Vagrant setup here if you like.

Note. I used a different database version for the upgrade article to more closely match what I have at work. This was basically a trial run for a work upgrade, although that will probably not happen for a few months because of other priorities.

I will revisit both articles once I get eyes on the documentation. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Thanks to Peter in the comments who found the docs here.

Cloud Control 13c Release 2 (13cR2) : It’s In Production Now

I didn’t think there would be quite so many posts about this journey, but we finally have Cloud Control 13cR2 in production, monitoring all our Oracle Database and WebLogic servers, and scheduling all our database backups.

Here are some of the posts that came out when I thought we would be using 13cR1.

And here is what I posted since 13cR2 was released.

All my 13c articles are here.

As I mentioned in some of the previous posts, we’ve gone for a slash & burn approach. We were running 12cR5 across the board. We built a new 13cR1 server, which subsequently got upgraded to 13cR2. Some of the early 12cR5 to 13cR1 agent upgrades didn’t go so well, so instead we removed the old agents and installed new ones. I used EMCLI to export some of the config, like backups definitions, so the transfer was pretty easy.

Remember, we are a pretty small company and we mainly use Cloud Control for monitoring and backups, so this replacement approach was relatively easy for us. If you are monitoring thousands of servers and use more of the Cloud Control features you may not want to take this approach. 🙂

Anyway, yesterday we got the 13cR2 agents installed on the last group of production servers, so we have completed the move!

I’m hoping there will be some time before 13cR3 is released. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Cloud Control 13c Release 2 (13cR2)

o-enterprisemgr-13c-clr-2769481We’ve finished the rollout of 13cR1 agents to all dev and test environments, but haven’t started the production rollout. Good job really as 13cR2 has now been released.

The announcements are here.

The downloads and documents are here.

My plan is now:

  • Stop the rollout of 13cR1 to production.
  • Test the clean install of 13cR2 and the upgrade of 13cR1 to 13cR2 at home. Articles will be coming soon.
  • Play about with it until I’m happy.
  • Upgrade the existing 13cR1 to 13cR2 and upgrade all the existing dev/test agents.
  • Gain some confidence in the new installation.
  • Roll it out to production.

Let’s hope I get this done before 13cR3. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c : It’s Alive!

ItsAlive

I wrote some blog posts about Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c a little over 6 months ago.

Since those posts we’ve had bigger fish to fry, so I pretty much put 13c on hold until now. I’ve just built a new 13c server and in the coming weeks will be transferring the hosts across to it from the old 12cR5 server.

I said in my upgrade post, we are going for the replace approach, rather than upgrading. That won’t we the best option for everyone, but it suits us this time.

I’m not sure how much, if anything, I’ll end up writing about it. Just thought I would mention I’ve finally got round to it. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c : Navigation and “Look and Feel”

o-enterprisemgr-13c-clr-2769481I’ve continued to play around with Cloud Control 13c and I’m generally getting a nice vibe from it.

One of the things I really hated about Grid Control 10g and 11g was the navigation. It felt like you had to click on 50 links to get to the thing you wanted. When Cloud Control 12c came along and had a main menu it was a massive improvement. Even so, it was still a little annoying as the menu was split, with some bits on the left and some bits on the top-right.

em12c-menu

In Cloud Control 13c, these menus have been brought together into the top-right of the screen.

em13c-menu1

If the screen size is smaller, the buttons collapse to show just the icons, which saves space.

em13c-menu2

It probably sounds really trivial, but having both menus together is a really nice touch. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been fumbling around, unable to find something, only to remember it is in that blasted menu at the top-right. Now there is no excuse. 🙂

The job scheduler navigation is also a lot nicer. In Cloud Control 12c we had a bunch of drop-downs and a “Go” button.

em12c-jobs

In Cloud Control 13c there are tiles along the top to alter the context of the output and the tree on the left allows you to quickly flip between criteria.

em13c-jobs

It is so much quicker to get the information you want this way.

So as far as I’m concerned, Cloud Control 13c is getting a big thumbs-up from a navigation perspective!

A couple of people have asked my impression about the new look and feel. If we ignore the navigation, most of the pages are quite similar to what we had before, so there is no need to panic. Overall it has a sparser, cleaner look, which is more in keeping with the way the web is these days, so I think that’s a good thing. Anyone who has used Oracle Cloud will find the look very familiar. 🙂

I guess the biggest bonus of the new look and feel is it is more responsive. On some of the old pages you had a lot of sideways scrolling to do if you have a small browser window. The new look and feel deals a lot better with that. It’s not perfect, but it is better. So I’m giving the new look and feel a big thumbs-up too!

Being the bitter old man that I am, I reserve the right to change my mind and hate it all in the future. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Caveat: I use a very small subset of the functionality available from Cloud Control, so my opinion is going to be based on the bits I use a lot. It might be that other areas have been adversely affected by the new navigation or look and feel, but the bits I care about are looking good.

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c Upgrade

em-12cA couple of weeks ago I posted about doing a fresh installation of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c (article, blog post). I’ve finally got around to doing an upgrade test from EM CC 12cR5 to 13cR1. You can see the result of that here.

upgrade-meme

Gokhan Atil did a post about this upgrade pretty much as soon as it was released, so I’m a little late to the party compared to him. 🙂

As you’ll see from the article, the upgrade process was similar to the patches that came before it. There are of course some extra prerequisites which you can read about in either my post, Gokhan’s or the docs…

Even though the upgrade tests were fine, after discussion with our system administrators, we are probably going to go for a clean installation and migrate the monitored hosts one at a time.

Why the slash and burn approach? I’ve made some mistakes with our installations in the past and they persist with every subsequent upgrade. It would be nice to take a step back and fix stuff. We are doing a similar thing with our WebLogic installations. I was learning new stuff all the time while I was installing our WebLogic 11g infrastructure. Rather than upgrading to WebLogic 12cR2, we are going to build a new infrastructure, migrate to it and throw the old one away.

This is relatively easy for us for a few reasons.

  1. We use virtualization for everything. We will provision the new VMs, set everything up. Start migrating stuff. When the migration is complete we will throw away the old VMs. No major hardware overhead.
  2. We are a pretty small operation. If we had a massive amount of infrastructure, a slash and burn approach would be very time consuming and as such, very costly.
  3. I am really anal about some things and I am willing to go the extra mile to get things right. I did the best I could at the time, but I’m happy to admit I made mistakes and I want to sort them out. This is not because I’m a company boy. It’s because those mistakes eat away at me and I want them eradicated so they will only haunt me in my memories, not in my day to day life.

If we had been going for the upgrade approach, I probably would have done it in the next couple of weeks. With clean slate approach, we’ll probably take a few more weeks to get ready for it. No point rushing in and making more mistakes. I would rather let the idea brew for a while before we start. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c : First Steps

o-enterprisemgr-13c-clr-2769481Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c Release 1 (13.1.0.0.0) was released a few days ago. Does that have the acronym “oemcc13cr1”? 🙂

As usual, my first steps are to do some basic installations. The approach is pretty similar to the 12c installations, but it’s a little greedier now. 🙂

My first attempt was a bit of a disaster. I was trying to install it on a VM with 8G of memory, about all I can spare on my work PC) and it was running like a dog. It got nearly to the end of the configuration section and I ran out of disk space on the physical host. That would have been OK if the installer were running on the VM itself, as the VM would have paused and resumed once I had cleared some space. Unfortunately, I was doing from an X session, which got killed and took my installer with it. 🙁 Rather than trying to continue on my piece of shit work PC, I waited until I got home to do it on my server.

Once home, I kicked off two installation simultaneously. One on OL6 and one on OL7. Each VM had 10G of memory and their virtual disks were on different spindles to the OS disk. As a result, they ran through at a reasonable pace. Not mega fast, but OK.

Over the Christmas break I’ll have a go at some upgrades, then decide if we should be doing this in production at work. If you’ve followed the discussion on Twitter, you’ll know some of the basic requirements.

  • Oracle 12c (12.1.0.2) Enterprise Edition for the repository database. Patched to latest security patch.
  • You can use a Non-CDB or a PDB for the management repository. The template database is still non-CDB.
  • OPTIMIZER_ADAPTIVE_FEATURES=FALSE

That means we will need an upgrade of our repository database from 11.2.0.4 to 12.1.0.2. That’s no big drama, but another thing to do. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Thanks to Seth Miller for pointing out my mistake about the PDB support for the OMR.