Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Managing Data Center Chaos E-Book
Porus Homi Havewala
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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Data centers around the world are experiencing an unprecedented era of growth due to expanding data volumes. There is also a corresponding increase in the number of databases and applications. In such rapid-growth centers, it is inevitable that fighting fires daily becomes a common occurrence. There is often no controlled method of performance management, neither is rapidly changing configuration information collected.
With the lack of automation and control, Data Centers do not often realize their intended cost-effectiveness and regress into a chaotic and uncontrolled day-to-day type of existence. This was the case until Oracle Enterprise Manager started being used as an Enterprise-wide central management solution, changing the whole game in the process.
In this brand new book by Porus Homi Havewala, one of the leading experts in the Oracle space, you will be introduced to the all-encompassing world of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, Oracle's premier product for managing and monitoring the Enterprise space. Drawing from the author's many years of experience in the real world, the book brings together the major capabilities of the latest Enterprise Manager software and demonstrates how to ease the growing pains of Data Centers.
The book takes you on a descriptive journey of what issues are normally experienced in the Data Center, and how Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c manages to address and resolve many of the issues.
The book introduces the reader to the typical chaos in Data Centers and discusses the way these common issues are normally resolved, by manual labor or manual scripting using extensive human resources. Then it will show you how Cloud Control 12c aids in Database Performance Management, Configuration Management, Security Compliance, Automated Provisioning, Automated Patching and Database Change Management.
You will learn how Cloud Control 12c allows Exadata Database Machine Monitoring and Management, Test Data Management for data subsetting of large databases, as well as Sensitive Data De-identification using Data Masking.
The book includes various real life examples and case studies of actual Oracle customers to show how they have benefited from using Oracle Enterprise Manager. It explores the strong standing of Oracle in the Enterprise Management game, now also strengthened by the new Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Table of Contents
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Managing Data Center Chaos
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Managing Data Center Chaos
Copyright © Packt Publishing
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Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
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First published: December 2012
Production Reference: 1111212
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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Cover Image by John M. Quick (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Porus Homi Havewala
Reviewers
Kamran Agayev A.
Richard Ridge
Mark Fletcher
Acquisition Editors
Stephanie Moss
Robin de Jongh
Lead Technical Editor
Arun Nadar
Technical Editors
Charmaine Pereira
Prashant Salvi
Copy Editors
Brandt D'Mello
Insiya Morbiwala
Aditya Nair
Alfida Paiva
Project Coordinator
Joel Goveya
Proofreader
Kevin McGowan
Indexer
Tejal Soni
Production Coordinator
Nitesh Thakur
Cover Work
Nitesh Thakur
About the Author
Porus Homi Havewala works as the Senior Manager (for database management)in the Enterprise Technology Program Office of Oracle Corporation, based in Singapore, and specializes in Oracle Enterprise Manager. He is a double Oracle Certified Master (OCM) in 10g and 11g, as well as the first Oracle employee ACE in the country. He was awarded the prestigious Oracle ACE Director title by Oracle HQ in 2008. There are less than 150 Oracle ACE Directors in the entire world and Porus was the very first Oracle ACE and ACE Director in Singapore – a recognition of his outstanding achievements in the Oracle world.
Porus has had extensive experience in Oracle technology since 1994; this includes him working as a Senior Production DBA, Principal Database Consultant, Database Architect, E-Business Technical DBA, Development DBA, and Database Designer and Modeler (using Oracle Designer). He has published numerous articles on Oracle Enterprise Manager on OTN, and has created http://enterprise-manager.blogspot.com, one of the world's first blogs dedicated to Enterprise Manager (with Oracle Press Credentials). Porus is also the author of the book, Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, Rampant TechPress which was published in 2010.
He started in the IT industry in the mid-1980s as a Turbo-C programmer in India and then as a dBase/FoxPro Developer in Australia. In the early 1990s he wrote a book on Microsoft FoxPro, which was his first published technical work. He entered the heady world of Oracle technology from 1994 as an Oracle DBA/Developer (using Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, and Oracle Designer).
In Telstra, the largest telecommunications company in Australia, Porus was the Senior Database Consultant in the central DBA team for a number of years and was responsible for database standards, database architecture, and the architecture, setup, and management of the first production Enterprise Manager Grid Control site in the world. He next worked in Oracle ACS India (Mumbai), and then with an Oracle Platinum Partner, S&I Systems in Singapore, before rejoining Oracle in the same city.
Porus is an enthusiast for Oracle technology, especially Oracle Enterprise Manager, on which he has conducted popular seminars and webinars for large MNCs, and implemented this powerful enterprise toolset. The following is a full list of his published technical articles and white papers on the Oracle Technical Network(OTN). A couple of these articles were in the most popular OTN article list in 2009. The OTN is the world's largest community of developers, DBAs, and architects.
Published white papers on OTN include:
Published technical articles on OTN include:
For the Internet links to the articles and white papers, please see the blog entry:
http://enterprise-manager.blogspot.sg/2012/11/latest-list-of-published-white-papers.html
In early 2009, Porus was also voted leader of the Oracle RAC Special Interest Group (SIG) in Singapore, a rotating position he held for 2 years.
Acknowledgements
No book is complete without an initial dedication and a thanks to all. I would like to dedicate this book to Lord Shri Ganesha, who is India's favorite deity – the Lord of Beginnings (every Start is dedicated to Him) and the Remover of obstacles. I pray for His Blessings on this work of mine, may it be a Success.
I also dedicate this book to a great revered saint of my Zoroastrian religion, Sant Dasturji Jamshedji Sorabji Kukadaru Saheb, who worked various miracles in his lifetime and to whom all of my Parsi community prays, when they need divine help. I pray for His Blessings on this work of mine, may it be a Success.
I would also like to dedicate this book to my dear departed father, Shri Homi Maneckji Havewala, who was a great unpublished writer of the English language and who imparted his love of English, as well as all things spiritual, to me as his only son. I pray for his Blessings on this work of mine, may it be a Success.
I would like to thank everyone involved in the book, especially my readers who have stood by me on the internet, making my Enterprise Manager articles on OTN quite popular over the years. It is for the readers that a writer writes, even a technical writer, and I have been blessed with excellent readers who have appreciated my enthusiasm for the product.
Most importantly, I would like to thank Havovi, my beloved wife who has helped and supported me throughout the writing of this book.
As always, I would like to thank my ex-manager, David Russell, who lives and works in Australia. I was the Lead Database Architect for Enterprise Manager under his corporate database technologies team for many years, and it is there that I started working with Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g. Our company was the first production site for this version of Enterprise Manager. It is indeed true that a good manager can actually make a person's career, and David has done this with his continual appreciation and encouragement, and I thank him for it.
I would like to thank all the editorial staff at Packt Publishing for helping out with the publication and editing of this book through all the versions and chapters.
Thanks are also due to my management at Oracle Corporation for their encouragement and support in writing the book, and to the Oracle Legal team for allowing the use of screenshots of the product from various sources.
Of course, the views and opinions expressed in this book are entirely my own, and do not represent the views and position of Oracle Corporation.
About the Reviewers
Kamran Agayev A. is an Oracle ACE and Oracle Certified Professional DBA working at AzerCell Telecom. He's an author of the book, Oracle Backup & Recovery, published by Rampant TechPress , and also shares his experience with a lot of step-by-step articles and video tutorials in his blog, http://kamranagayev.com.
He also makes presentations at Oracle OpenWorld, TROUG, and local events.
Richard Ridge is currently the APAC Database Manager for First Data. Richard has spent more than 15 years working as a Database Administrator and leading database administration teams. Richard has worked for large global corporations in the finance and telecommunication industry in both Australia and the UK, and has a strong background in running large and complex database platforms. He is an ex-colleague of the author.
Mark Fletcher has over 22 years of experience in the computer industry, working his way up from a simple Operator, to Helpdesk Support, to Programmer, Analyst, and Consultant. After working for 13 years with Oracle, which involved engagements in a number of countries, he is now putting what he has learned through his many experiences to practice in a large Australian company. He is also an ex-colleague of the author.
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Preface
I would like to extend a warm welcome to all readers of this new book, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Managing Data Center Chaos.
You are about to enter the exciting and wonderful world of Enterprise Manager, Oracle's premium product for management of the Oracle stack, right from the application layer down to disk level.
If you have used Enterprise Manager before and are aware of its capabilities, this will be a good primer for learning the brand new capabilities of the new version. For people who want to be introduced to Enterprise Manager for the first time, this will be a whole new world drawn from my professional experience of many years in the IT industry, written in easy-to-understand English.
I have included a number of advanced topics that demonstrate how Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c aids in database performance management, configuration management, security compliance, automated provisioning, automated patching, and database change management. You will also learn how Cloud Control 12c allows Exadata database machine monitoring and management, test data management for subsetting data of large databases, and sensitive data de-identification using data masking. This is followed by various real-life examples and case studies of actual Oracle customers to show how they have benefited from using Oracle Enterprise Manager.
Sit back and enjoy!
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Chaos at Data Centers, introduces the reader to the typical chaos in data centers and discusses the way these common issues are normally resolved, by manual labor or manual scripting using extensive human resources.
Chapter 2, Enter Oracle Cloud Control, reveals Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c as the suggested solution for managing the typical data center. The chapter includes recommended installation techniques and best architecture practices for this latest version of Oracle Enterprise Manager.
Additional content about this chapter can be found in the online chapter [italics]Installation/Upgrade Tactics and Architecture for Large Sites [/italics] at: http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/4781EN_Installation_Upgrade_Tactics_and_Architecture_for_Large_Sites.pdf
Chapter 3, Ease the Chaos with Performance Management, explains how Cloud Control 12c aids in database performance management by guaranteeing performance levels, proactively using various innovative techniques for diagnosis and tuning.
Chapter 4, Ease the Chaos with Configuration Management and Security Compliance, demonstrates how Cloud Control 12c aids in configuration management by automatically discovering components, collecting configuration information, and allowing configuration comparisons and historical searches of changes. Configuration compliance and security compliance is also explained.
Chapter 5, Ease the Chaos with Automated Provisioning, demonstrates how Cloud Control 12c performs automated provisioning of Oracle databases and software, enabling Provisioning Designers to use the new facility of profiles and locked-down procedures, which make it easier to provision a fully configured gold copy in the Oracle database and at the same time prevent Provisioning Operators from deviating from corporate standards.
Chapter 6, Ease the Chaos with Automated Patching, demonstrates how Cloud Control 12c allows automated patching of Oracle databases in the data center, thus making it possible to easily apply critical patch updates or patch set updates on a quarterly basis. The Patching Designer selects from a list of recommended patches, creates a patch plan template, and publishes it to the Patching Operator, who then creates a patch plan to apply the patch to target databases. After the initial selection, the download, validation and deployment of the patch (single or multiple) is fully automated, thus enabling mass deployment of patches to multiple database homes at prescheduled times. The new feature of out-of-place patching is explained in the chapter, as is the patch plan templates.
Chapter 7, Ease the Chaos with Change Management, explains how Cloud Control 12c allows the capture of all database schema changes and comparison of databases or schemas to aid in propagation of changes across the development lifecycle, greatly assisting in the auditing process as a result. The new Change Plans and the capability of data comparisons for seed or configuration data are also covered in the chapter.
Chapter 8, Ease the Chaos with Test Data Management, explains how Cloud Control 12c simplifies test data management by allowing subsetting of data so smaller test databases can be created from a larger production database. This leads to considerable storage cost savings in test environments.
Chapter 9, Ease the Chaos with Data Masking, explains how Cloud Control 12c can be used to discover confidential data and set up a centralized masking template library that can achieve obfuscation (de-identification) of any confidential data when copying data from production to test databases.
Chapter 10, Ease the Chaos with Exadata Management, explains how Cloud Control 12c aids in monitoring and managing the powerful Oracle Exadata system as a whole, both the hardware and software components, as well as the network infrastructure.
Chapter 11, Real-life Examples and Case Studies, and It's a Wrap – the Future is the Cloud, includes various real-life examples and case studies of actual Oracle customers to show how they have benefited from using Oracle Enterprise Manager. The final chapter explores the future of Cloud Computing and Oracle's strong standing in the cloud game, now also strengthened by the new Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c.
What you need for this book
This book is a practical step-by-step tutorial, with screenshots, for carrying out tasks and shows you how to manage and administer your data center with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c.
It is packed with best practices and tips that will help you benefit from the author's extensive experience working with Oracle Enterprise Manager for over a decade, combined with his IT industry experience spanning more than 25 years.
To follow the steps in this book, you need access to an Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c installation. You can install your own environment by following the detailed steps in the online chapter Installation/Upgrade Tactics and Architecture for Large Sites, Even if you don't have access to an environment, you can still read the book to get an idea of the capabilities of Enterprise Manager.
Who this book is for
If you are a data center, IT, or database team manager who wants to take advantage of the automation and compliance benefits of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Managing Data Center Chaos is for you. CTOs will also find this book useful.
Experience with Enterprise Manager is not essential as the author's experience tells you all you need to know about getting started with Enterprise Manager. More experienced readers will learn about the brand new capabilities of the Cloud Control 12c release.
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Chapter 1. Chaos at Data Centers
Studies show that many corporations world wide expect their IT footprint to grow in the coming years. They expect more servers, more databases, more data, and more of everything.
They require more floor space in their data centers, and correspondingly a greater power footprint. Have you heard of a data center where no more servers can be added as the power supply has reached its limit, or the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) can no longer cope? This story is not new, it happened a few years ago.
The growth seems to be endless—and this is fuelled by today's information age, where larger and larger volumes of data need to be stored and distributed to satisfy an ever-growing demand. More applications are using those databases, on more and more application servers.
So, for an IT manager, this will mean more of everything in his/her data centre. There may be different hardware platforms, different operating systems, for example, Solaris, Linux, IBM AIX, or Microsoft Windows, and in each such case there may be different versions such as the different flavors of Linux supplied by different vendors, including Oracle Enterprise Linux, Red Hat, SUSE Linux, and so on.
In the database arena, if a company has no policy of standardization for one particular database vendor, there may be different databases, such as Oracle, IBM DB2, or Microsoft SQL Server, in use by different projects.
Even if the databases belong to only one vendor, for example Oracle, the databases may be of different versions, such as Oracle Database 9i, 10g, or 11g. In the real world, it is very difficult to standardize on one version, as all applications may not be certified to use on that one database version. You may have some application vendors that say they are certified on Oracle Database 10.2.0.3 and not 10.2.0.5, and some that say they only use a particular version of Oracle Database 11g Release 1 and no other version.
So multiple database versions need to be installed separately, managed, patched as required, and upgraded when required. Also, development as well as test, staging, and production environments need to be provisioned (created) for each such database version. This level of complexity is the ground reality in today's data centers.
Team effort
The installation effort itself for each new project is huge.
First, a business project identifies the need for an application server and/or a database server. A formal request is made for these. The request is approved, and arrives at the doorstep (or mailbox) of the Unix/Windows team. Teams such as these are normally present in any reasonably sized IT department.
The Unix/Windows team then procures the necessary servers, gets access, and installs the operating system—frequently following manual checklists where they tick off each step. This team may also need to install additional packages/patches at the OS level, as requested by the project managers, and this information may or may not be available to the management at this stage. It may well be the case that any missing OS-level packages could cause delays and annoyances later down the track, but let us say this information is known, and the additional packages/patches are applied by the Unix/Windows team.
The hardware with the installed operating system is then forwarded to the database team in the IT department, where the DBAs get access to the server and install the database software, such as the Enterprise Edition of the Oracle database.
Certain options for the Oracle database may also need to be installed at this stage, such as the partitioning option or the advanced security option, depending on the requirements of the project and the licenses available with the company. Let us presume there is no standardization at this stage, so everything has to be decided manually, or guessed—if there are no clear instructions from the project side.
At this point, if certain OS packages/patches are missing, the DBAs may redirect the servers back to the Unix/Windows team for the missing components to be installed. Assuming this is done in a day or so, the DBAs then re-attempt the database software installation the next day (if they are lucky).
The database software thus installed may itself need to be patched, for example, if Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2.0.1.0) had been installed as the base release on the Solaris Operating System (SPARC) (64-bit), it should be patched on to the ultimate release of Oracle Database 10.2 on this platform, such as 10.2.0.5. It is always recommended to do this for production databases. Not patching for the ultimate or penultimate release can lead to issues later on when applying regular security patches that are often provided only for the latest releases of any version.
After this, the actual database is created. If there are no company standards, it is possible that each database created by different DBAs even in the same team may be different, for example one database may have the Sample Schemas provided by Oracle installed but another database may not have these installed. This is normally done via a simple manual selection in Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA)—Oracle's standalone graphical utility for creating new databases. One DBA may decide to select this, the other DBA may not.
There are other examples of similar configuration drifts. One DBA may decide to use Oracle Managed Files (OMF) for the data files of the database, another may not. It may depend on each individual and his/her likes or dislikes. For example, I, personally, have never used Oracle Managed Files even though there is nothing wrong with using them.
Even if there are published company standards for database creation, they may not be followed 100% of the time as standards are difficult to enforce when manual methods of installation are used and no control is enforced when performing the installation.
There is no separation of roles in the manual installation, there is no DBA Designer (the Senior DBA) who designs the database to be installed, and there is no DBA Operator (the Junior DBA) who follows the design and installs the database. It just depends on who does the installation and who does a better job—the Senior DBA or the Junior DBA. And frequently, the Senior DBA does not even have the time for repetitive installations and just leaves it to the Junior DBA. The Junior DBA then decides to try out different things for educational purposes – possibly.
The same scenario may be applicable to the middleware team when they install the application server software, such as Oracle WebLogic Server or Oracle Application Server, or application servers belonging to other vendors. Manual methods will lead to major or minor differences in the setup and configuration, and if there are no automated methods of checking the configuration compliance, it may lead to a near-impossible situation and there would be no way to enforce company standards on the middleware servers and domains either during or after installation.
The DBAs install the database software, patch it to the required level, and then create the databases required by the applications. They repeat this process for development, test, staging, and production environments.
After a reasonably successful installation, the DBA team is also requested to set up the backup of each database and also to set up the standby databases for disaster recovery using some tool, for example, Oracle DataGuard.
The setup of each backup and standby database is reasonably complicated, especially the latter, and involves a number of detailed steps. Also, each backup and disaster recovery scenario needs to be tested to ensure that it works.
Where is the time to do all this if everything is done manually?
Once the databases are released to the production environment, either the same team of DBAs or a different production team looks into the day-to-day workings of each database, and attempts to ensure that the application is guaranteed a certain level of performance—and this is a difficult order without automated tools.
Every database sooner or later needs diagnosis and tuning—as databases are not static; they change, their data changes, their users change, and their application changes. More load is placed on the database. More data is used in queries. All these changes are inevitable and eventually lead to performance issues.
First of all, to gain an understanding of these issues, performance information from the database is collected, manually analyzed, and certain worst-performing SQL statements are identified.
Each such SQL statement is then painstakingly fixed, often by adding indexes, perhaps without understanding the effect of extra indexes placing a heavier strain on inserts and updates.
Such manual performance diagnosis (finding out the problem) and tuning (fixing the problem) is obviously a very lengthy and tedious process, and is compounded when there are many tens or even hundreds of databases. A team of DBAs would be needed just to look at and fix day-to-day performance issues.
What about patching these databases?
My Oracle Support (MOS) releases Patch Set Updates (PSUs) and Critical Patch Updates (CPUs) every three months, and recommends that all databases are patched regularly with either the CPU or the PSU.
The CPU is a collection of security patches, and the PSU includes the CPU as well as other patches that fix separate issues.
If a particular company is security conscious and wants to make sure that the latest security patches have been applied to all its databases, there will be a need for the DBAs to apply the CPUs or PSUs every calendar quarter, and this involves downloading the appropriate patch, FTPing or SCPing it to each server, and then going through a series of manual steps to apply the patch.
This is fine if there are few databases, but if there are hundreds compounded with several environments for development, testing, and production, then the patches must be painstakingly applied on each and every database home and database.
It is possible, but it takes a lot of time manually. The DBAs will never get their sleep in this case, when they stay behind to complete the manual patching of the numerous databases. Also, the manual repetitive tasks they follow for this patching will be more prone to mistakes—as the mind itself gets numbed by constant repetition of the same steps.
Let us say, on top of all this, there are development projects that constantly upgrade their applications and send database scripts to the DBAs to make schema changes corresponding to the new application release.
This may include new tables, new columns, a modification of existing columns, or new database structures as well as new/modified users and their privileges on the objects.
To implement these changes at the database level for the purpose of such application upgrades, they would use a collection of SQL or PL/SQL commands in a script that they supply to the DBA—to run in the test and then in the staging environments. Finally, the scripts would be run on the production database if the application is found to work well on the test and staging databases.
First of all, the scripts themselves need to be checked thoroughly by the DBA, and this takes time.
The DBA needs to ensure the script is doing the right thing, which he/she does with a manual check, then perhaps a dry run on a separate test database to work out script issues, for example, the creation of indexes on nonexistent columns, the granting of privileges before the table is created, errors in SQL syntax, and so on.
The script then has to be modified and re-run before it is finally ready to be executed in the test environment, and the DBA may send a few stern emails to the developer team to be more careful next time.
Once this is done, the project team commences testing the application on the test database. After a green signal is received, the DBA will be asked to run the script on the staging and production databases.
The DBA then rests easy, thinking that the job is over, but suddenly receives a shock—the developer tells him that the application is not working in production (although it is working in staging and testing).
The DBA calls his/her home to say that he/she will be coming home late today, then starts to investigate the issue by painstakingly comparing the staging and the production databases. Every table, user, and privilege in the two databases has to be compared until the DBA finds out that certain privileges are missing on the production database, whereas the user had higher privileges on the other databases.
This simple reason has taken hours to be discovered. The DBA fixes the script, creates a final version for the particular release, and runs the necessary part of granting the extra privileges (by a cut and paste from the final script), and the application finally works.
Also, the only way the history of all these changes can be preserved in this case is by retaining the script files on the database server, versioning them, and storing them in subdirectories. This is sometimes done instead on the DBA's Windows PC.
Trying to look into such files in this directory structure to find out a past change is normally a very manual, labour-intensive, and painstaking process. I have done this many times all by myself, so am well aware of the issues.
When manual effort is the norm, in such data centers, it is inevitable that the DBAs and other administrators spend much of their time being reactive. Junior and less-trained staff on night shift hours would compound the issue, as would offshore technicians working remotely without a proper understanding of the internal environment.
For example, if the OS maintenance is off sourced and, say, the admin is asked to apply an OS upgrade, and as a part of the process the admin decided to change some OS properties under the impression that it will improve the OS performance. However, the next day, the on-site DBA finds that the standby database has stopped working, and he/she has no way of knowing what has changed as there is no automatic capture or history of configuration changes in such a manual environment. All the DBA has is the general information that the OS was upgraded, and he/she has to then investigate further by comparing, bit-by-bit, the configuration of the server on which the database is still working and the server on which the database has had the problem.
You can guess how much time and effort this may take?
Common solutions used in data centers
How do data centers attempt to address these issues? The short answer is simple: brute labor and/or an attempt at in-house automation using manually written scripts.
There is usually a team of Unix administrators and another team of Windows administrators who are responsible for manually preparing each and every piece of hardware by installing the operating system and patching it to the required level.
These administrators are also responsible for resolving issues with the systems they provision, such as missing pieces in the installation or performance issues that may be due to improper setup of the operating system (wrong values supplied for OS properties, for example, network buffer properties).
There is another team of Database Administrators (DBAs). These DBAs may specialize in Oracle or DB2 or SQL Server, and frequently in companies that seek to combine multiple roles, may dabble in all of these. (Indeed in the DBA world, it was once considered a plus point to know as many databases as possible, until the realization dawned that a real expert in one main database was more of a valuable asset than a DBA who knew multiple databases and their nuances, but only superficially.)
These teams of Unix, Windows, database and also the middleware administrators are put into action in their brute numbers, and this is normally seen in the highly-populated countries in the world today where there are a great number of administrators in the job market. The admin labor is available at a low cost in such markets, and consequently more administrators can be hired.
Such administrators, in an effort to be extremely competitive against their peers, and to appear extremely loyal to their work, proudly say "we never sleep" (sacrificing their family happiness in the process) and make themselves available for tackling all the issues mentioned—albeit in a manual, uncontrolled, haphazard manner that would be prone to multiple and deadly mistakes.
However, brute force, by throwing reams of administrators at the manual tasks, does work at fighting fires and keeping them under control. This technique is employed by a number of companies to handle their data centers. But then, they get used to fighting fires every other day.
The other scenario is the company that prides itself on the thousands of reams of scripts running its data center. These countless scripts are used in an attempt to automate the manual steps of managing the data center. They are used for provisioning, to collect the configuration, for patching, for applying the changes to the schemas, for backing up, and for creating and monitoring the standby disaster recovery databases.
However, these scripts are not a magic bullet—there needs to be an effort to write and maintain these scripts. As technology changes, more and more complicated scripts need to be written. The scripts may be layered unnecessarily and may become quickly outdated—for example, an Oracle RMAN script used to back up an Oracle 9i database may still be used to back up an Oracle 10g database, without using the new features such as Block Change Tracking and Fast Incremental Backups, present in the later releases of RMAN.
This is the very problem with scripts—they stay static.
The languages are not easy, and require expertise to write scripts—which is somewhat rare. The writers of such scripts soon establish a position for themselves in the company as heroes. They are available to script everything.
And when these heroes leave the organization, there is chaos.
Summary
In this chapter, we have seen the common issues in data centers (albeit from the eyes of the administrators) and the chaos that can be seen in any such center if there is no controlled management and automation. We hope you have gained a good insight.
Brute manual force and multitudes of scripts are often used as the last bastion of defense against the chaos, but ultimately succumb. They cannot cope with rapid change.
Even the script heroes are eventually engulfed by the rising tide of continuous scripting and sooner or later quit the company.
In the next chapter, we will take our first look at powerful Enterprise-Management software from Oracle that can be used to reduce this chaos to a negligible extent, so that the data center can be managed efficiently from a central console, and with the barest minimum of scripts. Read on.
Chapter 2. Enter Oracle Cloud Control
What if we told you that there is an enterprise-class management product from Oracle, which, if used appropriately, would help in resolving the chaos of the data centers?
Yes, there indeed is such a product. Enter Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, which is the latest version of Oracle's Enterprise Manager. This is installed centrally on a dedicated server and used for managing and monitoring the entire Oracle Technology Stack, with an Agent placed on each Target that Enterprise Manager is to manage or monitor.
In the previous versions of Enterprise Manager, 11g and 10g, the product could optionally be installed locally when the database software or application server software was installed on a server. In this cut-down form, it was known as Oracle Database Control or Oracle Application Server Control, respectively. This type of single Target Enterprise Manager is no longer available in the 12c version at the time of writing this book.
What we do have is Cloud Control 12c, which is the full, all-encompassing flavor of Oracle Enterprise Manager. Appropriately named, Cloud Control 12c can manage the 9i, 10g, and 11g versions of Oracle databases, and Oracle middleware, including Oracle Fusion, Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle Application Server. Cloud Control 12c can also manage Oracle Applications such as Fusion Apps, Siebel, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards Enterprise One. It also manages Oracle VM and Oracle Sun Servers and Storage in the form of Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c.
Thus, it is apparent that Cloud Control 12c can do application-to-disk management, as it manages everything from the application down to the database, middleware, virtual machine, server, and storage (disk) level.
Cloud Control 12ceven goes above, to the business layer, and is able to define and manage your business transactions on services across a service bus, and can be used to set up the entire infrastructure for the Cloud—whether the Cloud is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Database as a Service (DBaaS), or Platform as a Service (PaaS).
It is also able to deliver the Cloud via self service, and manage the Cloud, including metering and chargeback services. As business transaction management capabilities are included, this means Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is able to achieve business-driven Cloud Management.
The DbaaS Cloud capabilities of Enterprise Manager are based on the database lifecycle management features of the product. We will go through the database lifecycle management features in the coming chapters.
And besides the Oracle technology stack, Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is able to monitor and perform configuration management of non-Oracle hardware and software, such as non-Oracle Hosts (for example, HP-UX, IBM AIX, and Windows), non-Oracle storage such as EMC and NetApp, as well as firewalls, load balancers, and network devices.
This is done via Enterprise Manager plugins written either by Oracle or third-party vendors. At the time of writing this book, a few of the plugins are being rewritten for Cloud Control and will be released in stages.
But is Cloud Control 12c a new product, or does it have a long history? The answer is yes to both. To understand this, we will have to go back in time.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is certainly a long way from the days of Oracle Server Manager, the initial version that was released in the mid 1990s and was a simple and limited GUI interface used for some aspects of database administration only (along with a command-line interface, server manager line mode, or svrmgrl).
The DBAs at that time saw it as a novelty and used it very sparingly. They laughed at it. But it was the first attempt by Oracle at a GUI management tool.
This was followed by Oracle Enterprise Manager, called OEM initially. First OEM Version 1 was released, followed by OEM Version 2.2, which could be used with Oracle Database 8i. The next version, OEM 9i could be used with Oracle Database 9i and this was a much better-looking Java console that had to be installed on your Windows PC or workstation. Even though there were Java-related memory and performance issues with this version, it had increased acceptance among DBAs, who started using it in greater numbers.
The next version, Enterprise Manager (EM) 10gwas introduced in the first decade of this century. It used theN-tier architecture, using Oracle Application Server as the backend application server for the actual Enterprise Manager Java application. This was an OC4J application, that is, Oracle Containers For J2EE (OC4J) 10g, which was compliant with Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
