Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.5

The release of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.5 was officially announced last week, but I think it’s been available for download for a little longer. The first I noticed was the official announcement though. 🙂

That prompted the usual flurry of articles.

As well as the articles, you can find the Vagrant builds of Cloud Control 13.5 on Ol7 and OL8 in my Vagrant GitHub repo here.

Our current installation is running on an Oracle Linux 6 VM, so I was just about to start a new build on a new OS, which would have the added bonus of allowing us to use Oracle 19c under the hood. Now I can go straight to 13.5, which is nice.

I’ve mentioned before, we use EMCLI to add targets and jobs into Cloud Control, so rather than upgrading as I normally do, this time I’ll probably do a clean build on the new kit and gradually migrate services across to it.

Happy upgrading! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Cloud Control 13.4 : Silent Installation and Silent Upgrade

A little over a week ago Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.4 was released. The following weekend I spent 3 days running builds constantly trying to get a clean install to work. Eventually I tweeted out in frustration and a friendly face at Oracle, who I’ve stalked on numerous occasions, put me in touch with the EM dev team.

Having had a quick look at my Vagrant build, they suggested I unset the CLASSPATH environment variable, and a working build was born. Thanks very much to the EM dev team! Without them I would have spent days looking at it and would probably still have failed.

Installation

The resulting Vagrant build and an article about the silent installation of Cloud Control 13.4 can be found here.

One thing that still irks me somewhat is the documentation about the adaptive optimizer parameters. The documentation says the following.

“If your Management Repository is using Oracle Database 12.2 or higher, none of these parameters need to be set.”

This is not true, and you always get this error message.

“ERROR:
The following prerequisite check failed because the Oracle Database, where the Management Repository will be configured, does not meet the configuration requirements. Fix the issue manually based on the recommendation offered for this prerequisite, and click OK. For more details, check the logs: /u01/app/oracle/middleware/cfgtoollogs/oui/emdbprereqs
Prereq Name Recommendation
Check if all adaptive features parameters are unset All adaptive features parameters should be unset for improved SQL performance”

I even tried a GUI installation, in case there was a difference between the GUI and silent installations. There wasn’t.

The workaround is to amend a bunch of underscore parameters that are only meant to be necessary when running a patched version of Oracle database 12.1 as the repository database.

alter system set "_optimizer_nlj_hj_adaptive_join"= FALSE scope=both sid='*'; 
alter system set "_optimizer_strans_adaptive_pruning" = FALSE scope=both sid='*';
alter system set "_px_adaptive_dist_method" = OFF scope=both sid='*'; 
alter system set "_sql_plan_directive_mgmt_control" = 0 scope=both sid='*';
alter system set "_optimizer_dsdir_usage_control" = 0 scope=both sid='*'; 
alter system set "_optimizer_use_feedback" = FALSE scope=both sid='*';
alter system set "_optimizer_gather_feedback" = FALSE scope=both sid='*'; 
alter system set "_optimizer_performance_feedback" = OFF scope=both sid='*';

It’s not a show stopper, so I can live with it, but it’s annoying, and the documentation should be altered to reflect the reality.

Upgrade

The next challenge was to work through an upgrade from a previous release. I worked through this using a starting point of 13.3. I already had a vagrant build for 13.3, but I made a few changes to bring it up to date, and add some more disk space. I also renamed the directory structure to make things a little neater.

The upgrade itself was very similar to that of the previous version. You can find the article about the silent upgrade to 13.4 and the Vagrant build I used to test the upgrade here.

Now remember, this is a simple upgrade of a totally clean 13.3 build to 13.4, so I’m not saying this is an exhaustive test, and I’m not saying this is proof it will work for you.

Next Steps

The next challenge will be to try a real upgrade at work. Work is crazy at the moment, so I’m not sure how long I will have to wait before doing this.

Most of our kit is VMware virtual machines running Oracle Linux, and the Cloud Control server is no exception, so I can get a backup of the whole VM before the upgrade, and just restore back to that in case of a disaster.

An ideal place to be is to have your build scripted, including the reconfiguration of all your targets. After a previous “issue”, I went through our existing config and built the EMCLI scripts to replace it all. I *think* I can rebuild everything from scratch if I need to. We do all new agent installations, target discovery and setup using EMCLI now, so I think all the retrofitted stuff will work too, but I have to admit I’m kind-of scared to try. 🙂

Conclusion

I don’t like to do anything at work unless I’ve already done it at home first. It’s taken me pretty much 5 full days (Fri, Sat, Sun, Fri, Sat) to get through this, but it’s done now, and I feel I can have a try at work without looking like a total fool now! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.3 on Oracle Database 19c

I’ve had some articles about Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.3 on the site for quite a while now. The first installation and upgrade articles were posted over a year ago.

More recently I posted about a Vagrant build and a silent upgrade.

At the time, the certification matrix said Oracle 19c was not certified to hold the OMS repository, so my article and Vagrant build didn’t include it. A few days ago someone asked me if it would work on 19c, and I was just about to reply and say it wasn’t certified, but I thought I better check first. It is now certified (if you are on the latest versions of the DB plugin), so I thought I better give it a run through.

The process was the same for 19c, so all I had do was unzip the 19c media into the renamed ORACLE_HOME and the rest went fine. I’ve done some minor updates to the articles and the Vagrant build to reflect this.

So if you are on OL7/RHEL7, you are good to upgrade to 19c for the OMS repository. 😉

Happy days!

Cheers

Tim…

Update: JE in the comments pointed out the requirement to be on the latest plugins for 19c to work (see here). They also pointed out the loss of the Top Activity screen. From my perspective:

  • I always run with the latest plugins if possible.
  • The Top Activity screen is replaced by the ASH Analytics screen, which does all the same things, but I would say the window adjustment makes it a bit better. It took a little time to get used to it, but I use it in the same way I used the Top Activity screen on versions from 11.2 to 19c with no drama.

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.3 Silent Upgrade

A few days ago I put out a post called Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.3 Vagrant Build. In a comment on that post Dinesh said,

“Would like to see the silent upgrade from oem12c to oem13c upgrade post from you”

I normally try to keep on top of upgrades, so I’ve never done a jump bigger than one version, but I was checking through the documentation, and assuming it’s a supported start version, there isn’t much difference between the upgrades from most versions, so I thought I would give it a go. As I mentioned in the last post, I already had a GUI upgrade article.

I didn’t have a silent upgrade though. I do now. 🙂

In order to try this out I did a Vagrant build of Cloud Control 12cR5, to give me an easy way to get a clean starting point. You can see that here. If you want to practice the upgrade, it’s a really easy way to do it.

I’ve left the agent upgrade using the Cloud Control interface, but there is an example of how to do it silently using WLST here. It’s pretty simple.

So not only did I not expect to be writing that post a few days ago, but I certainly didn’t expect to be writing this one. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.3 Vagrant Build

A little short of a year ago I knocked up a Vagrant build to prepare an environment for practising Cloud Control 13.3 installations and upgrades. This just automated the creation of the environment and installation of the database, ready for me to start playing around with the Cloud Control bit. At the time I released these articles.

I didn’t mention anything about the Vagrant build as it didn’t do much more than build the database, so it didn’t seem worth mentioning. It was just a convenience for me.

More recently someone pointed it out on Twitter and I made a note to myself to “finish it off” and make it do a full silent build, then kind-of forgot again.

A few days ago I had a self-induced problem with our Cloud Control server, and I realised I didn’t have the best plan of action for a complete rebuild scenario. I had backups, so I didn’t need to do a rebuild, but that doesn’t stop me wanting to be able to do it, so I did the following things…

I scripted a silent build of the work environment we use. I put together a general article to show how to do a silent build of a simple installation too. If you’re interested you can see it here.

I wrote some EMCLI scripts to do most of the tasks I needed for a complete rebuild. We already use EMCLI for some of the stuff, like jobs, but I filled in the gaps where I had been a bit lazy. Those are all checked into a company Git repo, and they are quite specific to what we need, but there are some basic EMCLI examples available here, if you are interested in getting into EMCLI.

Finally, I made my Vagrant build a fully automated Cloud Control 13.3 build on Oracle database 18c. According to the certification matrix, Oracle 19c is not yet certified for the repository database (but someone on Oracle-L said this certification is imminent (See Update)). If you are interested in playing around with Vagrant, you can find it here. I’ve managed to get away with 6G of memory, but that makes it chronically slow. The more memory you can throw at it the better. 🙂

I didn’t really expect to be revisiting this stuff a year down the line, but it was born out of necessity, or at least necessity for my peace of mind. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: The OMS is now supported on Oracle database 19c.

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) : It’s Alive!

o-enterprisemgr-13c-clr-2769481I delayed our upgrade from Cloud Control 13cR1 to 13cR2 until I finished all my travelling. It’s not really fair to make a major change then swan off round the world. 🙂

Yesterday was the day. I got in and started the upgrade, following the process I documented here and it worked. 🙂

ItsAlive

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I had tested it all at home anyway.

We now have Cloud Control 13cR2 monitoring all out Dev and Test systems. For the next few days we’ll be kicking the tyres before continuing to roll it out to production, which is still currently monitored by Cloud Control 12cR5.

You can read my notes about this stuff here.

There are some related blog posts on this subject here.

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c Release 2 (13cR2) Installation/Upgrade

em13cOracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c Release 2 (13cR2) was released a couple of weeks ago. In a previous post I mentioned we were going to stop our rollout of 13cR1 agents to production and upgrade from 13cR1 to 13cR2 before we resumed.

I don’t like doing anything at work that I haven’t already tried at home, so the first step in that process was for me to do some clean installs and practice upgrades. After a busy weekend and a late night last night I think I’m happy with the process. That resulted in these articles.

If you’ve done a 13cR1 installation, the clean 13cR2 installation will come as no surprise. They now have multitenant and non-CDB repository templates to choose from. I used the multitenant template in this example. The installation was fine on both OL6 and OL7, so nothing out of the ordinary to report there.

The upgrade process was similar to previous point release upgrades too. We used the non-CDB template, the only one available at the time, to build our 13cR1 installation, so not surprisingly I practised the upgrade using that as a starting point. The upgrade process went fine, but I got a lot of warning messages during the process. It was all working fine at the end though…

I guess we will start rolling this bad-boy out once I get back from the APAC Tour and Bulgaria (BGOUG).

Cheers

Tim…