AIM SIG and my talk about Enterprise Manager 12c

Yesterday I presented at UKOUG’s Availability, Infrastructure and Management Special Interest Group (hey, say this 3 times in a row, quickly!) about Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c and my experience with it. As my good fried Piet de Visser pointed out I had way too much to say for the 45 minute slot allocated. But then Piet always tells me that. Sadly he is also often right :) That’s why I like seeing him during my talks!

In summary I would have liked to do a different presentation, and that’s for two reasons: 1) I overran and 2) I haven’t managed to show the patching part which is hugely interesting, at least to me.

Now here’s the reason for the blog post. I haven’t done online seminars yet, and was wondering if people were interested in a 1-1.5 hour UKOUG-like presentation from myself, broadcast via Goto Meeting or similar to an audience. Would that be of interest? The topics to be covered are:

• Thinking about the installation of OEM 12c including HA and other deployment options
• Walking through the installation using print screens (it takes too long and I would bore you showing a slow moving progress bar)
• Demo time, i.e. logging on to the system and showing a few things

For the interactive part I’d

• show the new user interface
• walk through the agent push
• demonstrate how to add a target
• and finally guide you through the patching process

I prefer this to be interactive (technology permitting), with a timescale of 1 to 1.5 hours and a Q&A session at the end. I will try to set something up if there is sufficient interest.

WARNING & disclaimer

I’m not an expert in OEM 12c! I installed it, played with it and can show you what I know.

RAC One Node on Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

One of the promises from Oracle for OEM 12c was improved support for Oracle RAC One Node. I have spent quite a bit of time researching RON, and wrote a little article in 2 parts about it which you can find here:

• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/oem/raconenode-dataguard-435121.html
• http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/oem/raconenode-dataguard-2-435128.html

One of my complaints with it was the limited support in OEM 11.1. At the time I was on a major consolidation project, which would have used OEM for management of the database.

OEM 11.1

Unfortunately OEM 11.1 didn’t have support for RAC One Node. Why? RON is a cluster database running on just one node. The interesting bit is that the ORACLE_SID is your normal ORACLE_SID with an underscore and a number. Under normal circumstances that number is _1, or RON_1. But as soon as you relocate the database using srvctl relocate database -d a second instance RON_2 is started until all sessions have failed over.

OEM obviously doesn’t know about RON_2: it was never discovered. Furthermore, the strict mapping of instance name to host is no longer true (the same applies for policy managed databases by the way!). A few weeks and a few switchover operations later you could be running RON_2 on racnode1.

As a consequence, the poor on-call DBA is paged about a database that has gone down, when it hasn’t-it’s up and running. As a DBA, I wouldn’t want that. After discussions with Oracle they promised to fix that problem, but it hasn’t made it into 11.1 hence this blog post about 12.

Installing OEM 12c agents in RPM format

One of the questions I have always asked myself revolved around: “why doesn’t Oracle package certain software as an RPM on Linux?” Well this question has recently been answered in the form of the Oracle 12c agent. It IS possible to use an RPM based installation, although it doesn’t make 100 use of RPM. I have written this post to give you an idea what happens.

The procedure is described in the OEM 12 Cloud Control Advanced Installation and Configuration Guide, chapter 6. The process is very similar to the non-RPM based agent deployment. Let’s have a loot at it in detail.