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Oracle enterprise manager Ops Center 12c - First impressions

Published on: 04 May 2012 Author: Jos Nijhoff Category: Oracle

It had been my intention to get out a blog entry and tell you about Ops Center 11g with the Exalogic X2-2, and the integration of Ops Center with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. Next to Enterprise Manager, I therefore installed Ops Center 11g side-by-side, in a separate VM.

However, I finally came to the conclusion that the 11g version just wasn’t quite up to the same level as Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, particularly in regard to the integration between them both. So… I waited for Ops Center 12c.

One area that had serious issues was configuring the Exalogic Elastic Cloud plug-in that provides the interaction between Cloud Control and Ops Center 11g. It really isn’t clearly described, for instance when entering the ‘InfiniBand Fabric discovery IP ‘ (basically – it didn’t succeed!!)

Also the 11g version is not really ‘Exa-aware’. There are some annoying glitches such as (re)discovering the Exalogic Compute Nodes and errors when updating the agent controllers.

OK. So, what does work at present?
• Asset Discovery at component level
• ‘Self upgrade’ via My Oracle Support Integration
• Automatic Service Request and My Oracle Support Integration
• OEM12c to Ops Center 11g integration (one way)

Let’s have a look at these one by one.

Asset Discovery
It is not that the 11g version does not work for Exalogic: the discovery of InfiniBand switches and the ZFS Storage Appliance actually went well, as shown in figures 1a and 1b (You will have to upgrade to PSU3 patchset, build 1571 or later via the ‘self-upgrade’, see below).

Figure 1a: results after ‘Asset Discovery’ of the ZFS storage.

However, in this version the Exalogic still remains a normal ‘User Defined Group’ – which you have to compile – and not a clearly defined separate entity.

In short: Ops Center 11g does not yet know what a ‘real’ Exalogic entity is. Rather, it seems to consider it as only a series of component parts. This is illustrated in figure 1b.

Figure 1b: results after ‘discovery’ of ZFS storage, network switches and compute nodes.

Self upgrade’ through My Oracle support integration.

Speaking of self-upgrade: this is a great feature in Ops Center that works pretty well. I have put a couple of representative screenshots below to illustrate.

Figure 2a: updates available via My Oracle Support.

Figure 2b: a new version of the Enterprise Controller is being downloaded

Automatic service request and My Oracle Support integration

Ops Center also works well together with the Automatic service request (ASR) feature of Exalogic, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 3: a tar bundle with diagnostic information sent to My Oracle Support (MOS).

With the ASR, a tar bundle with diagnostic information is automatically sent to My Oracle Support, and that gets immediately reported in OpsCenter. No intervention by an administrator is required! As it turned out, there was no real hardware problem, but it’s pretty cool that there is ongoing analysis and monitoring…

OEM12c to Ops Center 11g integration

The integration of Cloud Control in the direction of Ops Center also works well, as shown below in figure 4:

Figure 4: information on targets in Cloud Control 12c will be visible in Ops Center 11g.

In the picture, we are looking at a database with listener and a weblogic domain active on compute node 8. We can also see the relationship of these items with the Linux OS and the network.
NOTE ! The SOA repository database is running only on the Exalogic for a ‘Proof of Concept’. In a live acceptance/production you would use a Database Appliance or an Exadata [machine].
In particular, it is the reverse integration – namely that of Ops Center 11g in Cloud Control 12c – which is not yet sufficiently robust.
But it is precisely this integration we want because it adds the most value.

So… Thanks for everything, 11g. Now… over to Ops Center 12c

Now that Ops Center 12c is available, see the following links:

Ops Center 12c, according to Oracle, is wholly ‘Exa-aware’ (see this paper,), That is why yesterday I, together with a colleague, dismantled the 11g version. Here’s our steps:

Unmanage/remove all Exalogic related assets in OpsCenter 11g
Cloud Control: remove related targets and agent for the Ops Center 11g server
Shutdown and delete Ops Center 11g host VM, then restore the vanilla backup of this VM
Start the Ops Center 12c installation. Check first with the OC Doctor 12c utility.

Next time – a post on another important issue: the updating/patching of the Exalogic, and of course more about OpsCenter 12c and the integration with Cloud Control 12c.
I soon hope to have a few pictures of an ‘EM 12c managed’ Exalogic rack to show you as well!

Publicatiedatum: 4 mei 2012

About the author Jos Nijhoff

Jos Nijhoff is an experienced Application Infrastructure consultant at Qualogy. Currently he plays a key role as technical presales and hands-on implementation lead for Qualogy's exclusive Exalogic partnership with Oracle for the Benelux area. Thus he keeps in close contact with Oracle presales and partner services on new developments, but maintains an independent view. He gives technical guidance and designs, reviews, manages and updates the application infrastructure before, during and after the rollout of new and existing Oracle (Fusion) Applications & Fusion Middleware implementations. Jos is also familiar with subjects like high availability, disaster recovery scenarios, virtualization, performance analysis, data security, and identity management integration with respect to Oracle applications.