Enterprise Manager | The ORACLE-BASE Blog

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c : First Steps

Oracle 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.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c Release 1 (13.1.0.0) Installation on Oracle Linux 6 and 7

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.

EM Cloud Control 12c : The 24 Hour DBA

I think I’ve lived through all the ages of Enterprise Manager. I used the Java console version back in the days when admitting you used it got you excommunicated from the church of DBA. I lived through the difficult birth of the web-based Grid Control. I’ve been there since the start of Cloud Control. I’ll no doubt be there when it is renamed to Big Data Cloud Pixie Dust Manager (As A Service).

I was walking from the pool to work this morning, checking my emails on my phone and it struck me (not for the first time) that I’m pretty much a 24 hour DBA these days. I’m not paid to be on call, I’m just a 9-5 guy, but all my Cloud Control notifications come through to my phone and tablet. I know when backups have completed (or failed). I know when a Tnsping takes too long. I know when we have storage issues. I know all this because Cloud Control tells me.

Now you might look on this as a bad thing, but being the control freak I am, I prefer to get a message on a Sunday telling me something is broken, hop on the computer and fix it there and then, rather than coming in on Monday to a complete sh*t-storm of users complaining. I’m not paid to do it, but that’s the way I roll.

While walking down memory lane I was thinking about all the scripting I used to do to check all this stuff. Endless amounts of shell scripts to check services and backups etc. I don’t do hardly any of that these days. Cloud Control handles all that.

We are a pretty small Oracle shop, but I think life would be a whole lot more difficult without Cloud Control. I’ve mentioned this a number of times, but it’s worth saying again… If you have more than a handful of Oracle databases, you really should be using Cloud Control these days. It’s as simple as that.

Just in case you are wondering, this is how our infrastructure looks this morning… 🙂

em-all-green

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 4 (12cR4) Articles

I’ve started to play around with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12R4. The clean installations on Oracle Linux 5 and Oracle Linux 6 were really easy. You can see how I did them here.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 4 Installation on Oracle Linux 5.9 and 6.5

I used 11.2.0.4 as the database repository. I’ll probably have a go with a 12c database in future, which is now supported, but my main focus this time was to check out something similar to what I have at work. Forgive my caution, but I’ll not be using 12c database for my EM repository for a while yet. Cloud Control is too important to risk…

I wasn’t going to bother with an upgrade article because Gokhan Atil wrote a good blog post about the upgrade here. Whilst going through the upgrade, there were a few things I needed to make extra notes on, since I have an terrible memory, so it ended up as a separate article.

Upgrade Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 3 (12cR3) to Release 4 (12cR4)

Ultimately, you are going to need to read the upgrade docs because there are lots of caveats to think about, depending on what options you use.

Previous upgrades at work were a pain, but we had a more complicated installation with multiple management servers and a separate database. More recently we switched to running a simple configuration (DB and OMS on the same server) on an Oracle Linux VM. That makes doing a trial run of the upgrade at home a more realistic test. Whether it’s an improved Cloud Control upgrade process or the fact this is a single machine setup, the upgrade was really easy. Now that I’ve practiced the upgrade at home, I’m feeling relatively confident doing the upgrade in production. I’ll probably leave it until I get back from Bulgaria (BGOUG). It’s not really fair to change everything and then leave the country… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 Installation…

I did an EM Cloud Control 12cR2 installation at work yesterday. The database repository was 11.2.0.3 on HP-UX and the middle tier was installed on RHEL 5.8. The installation was pretty much the same as the 12cR1 version. Over the next few days I’ll be testing out some of the features to decide if we can move across to it permanently.

Today I did two run throughs of single server installations on Oracle Linux 5.8 and 6.3. There are a couple of minor differences, but nothing to worry about. You can see what I did here:

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 Installation on Oracle Linux 5.8 and 6.3

The installations are a little small, so they are not too fast, but it’s good enough to test things out.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: It’s been a while since I used the 12c version, so I’ve had to relearn a few simple things. I thought I might as well write the down in case it helps others.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 Post-Installation Setup Tasks