Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c (referred to hereafter as EM12c) is the latest version of Oracle Corporation’s end-to-end management tool for both Oracle and non-Oracle technology. Previously known as Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) or Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, the tool has been around for quite some time now. The 12c release, though, is a landmark version that makes huge advances in terms of both the breadth and depth of its functionality. In many ways, this release has moved Enterprise Manager from being a database administrator’s monitoring tool, to a tool that can be used to manage your entire data center. EM12c now covers several focus areas, including the following:

• Framework and infrastructure: EM12c provides security, scalability, a rich user interface, the new Self Update functionality, and more.
• Enterprise monitoring: You can monitor the status of your entire infrastructure, including databases, middleware, and applications. EM12c provides ways of notifying you when issues arise, resolving them, and reporting on them.
• Cloud management: Managing the cloud is a hot topic in the industry today, and EM12c provides a range of solutions in this space, including chargeback/showback, policy-based resource management, and self-service provisioning.
• Lifecycle management: Administering computing systems today requires many manual processes for the discovery, provisioning, patching, change management, and configuration management of those systems. EM12c automates many of these manual processes, freeing the administrator to spend more time on other, higher-priority tasks.
• Database management: Managing databases has been a key feature of OEM since its first release. That continues in the EM12c release, including solutions around patching, upgrading, provisioning, performance tuning, data masking, and subsetting, as well as configuration and change management.
• Middleware management: A key component of EM12c is providing comprehensive management capabilities across all of Oracle’s middleware products (including WebLogic Server, SOA Suite, Identity Management, WebCenter, and Coherence), as well as non-Oracle middleware (such as IBM’s WebSphere or JBoss Application Server).
• Application management: Monitoring and management solutions for all the Oracle-provided applications (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, and Fusion Applications) come out of the box with EM12c, in addition to capabilities for managing your own custom-built or third-party applications.
• Application performance management: EM12c delivers end-to-end monitoring of your applications, including real-user monitoring via Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) as well as synthetic-transaction monitoring via Service Level Management beacons. Other functionality introduced here includes the ability to monitor and trace business transactions, topology discovery, and Java and database monitoring and diagnostics.
• Application quality management (AQM): Three areas of testing are provided—application testing via the Application Testing Suite product, infrastructure testing via Real Application Testing and Application Replay, and test data management functionality that includes test system creation, data masking, and data subsetting technologies.
• Hardware and virtualization management: Complete lifecycle management is offered for both physical and virtual environments, including provisioning, patching, configuration management, administration, and monitoring. This includes managing systems running on Linux, Unix, Windows, and Oracle Virtualization Server (Oracle VM Server) operating systems, as well as providing insight into the server, network, and storage layers for systems built on top of Oracle Sun hardware.
• Heterogeneous (non-Oracle) management: Supplying a range of extensions known as connectors and plug-ins (among others), EM12c provides capabilities to manage non-Oracle technology in addition to Oracle environments. These extensions could be built by Oracle, partners, or even customers themselves. They are based on the same management framework as the rest of the EM12c product, and so can be downloaded, imported, and deployed by the Self Update mechanism.

Coverage of all these focus areas adds up to a robust product for managing the complete data center. The rest of this book drills into the details of many of these areas. The remainder of this chapter introduces you to the basic architecture that you need to understand before delving further into the wonders of EM12c.

Architecture Overview

From an architectural perspective, EM12c is composed of five main parts:

• Cloud Control console
• Oracle Management Agent
• Oracle Management Service
• Oracle Management Repository
• Plug-ins

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

A High-Availability EM12c Configuration

In the most basic of EM12c installations, the OMS and the repository can be physically located on a single machine. However, Oracle recommends placing these two components on different machines. Figure 1-3 shows  the simplest installation.

Although this relatively simple architecture may be sufficient for an initial deployment, you might need to grow it into a more scalable, available architecture. There are four levels of deployment that you could use with EM12c to achieve higher scalability and availability. Of course, as in any architecture requiring both scalability and availability, trade-offs need to be made in terms of increasing cost as performance and availability increase.

The Software Library

Another important part of an Enterprise Manager installation is the Software Library. The Software Library is a storage area used for such things as patches, Self Update downloads, and gold images. It is depicted earlier, in the diagrams in the section “A High-Availability EM12c Configuration,” as shared storage sitting between the OMSs. (Figure 1-5 shows it clearly. There you’ll see the shared storage icon almost dead-center). To create the Software Library, you use the Software Library: Administration page, available from the Setup Provisioning and Patching Software Library menu path. The Software Administration page is shown in Figure 1-7.

One important point to be aware of when creating your Software Library is that you need to ensure that the location you create the Software Library in is accessible from each OMS, if at some stage you believe your EM12c deployment will require some level of high availability. This can be achieved by using the same network file system (NFS) share mounted on each OMS, or any other technology that allows sharing file systems between machines.

The EM12c release includes several new features related to the Software Library:

• In this release, the Software Library becomes the single location for a lot more entities, such as directives and assemblies. (These new entities are explained in Chapter 5.) Many of these entities are self-updateable, so we now have integration with Self Update.
• Oracle has also expanded the storage-type support, so you now have support for NFS filesystems being shared between OMSs as well as any filesystem that we can reach (that is, agent filesystems can now be used to host the Software Library as well).
• Referenced locations are now supported for the Software Library, so if you have a centralized location for serving these entities that is separate from the OMS, you can now reference those via HTTP, NFS, and so forth. In this case, the OMS stores the metadata about where this referenced location is, and the software bits are stored externally.
• A range of other capabilities exist in this release. You can, for example, attach support notes or readme files to Software Library entities. The library includes improved search capabilities, and of course the new privilege model allows the use of fine-grained privileges for entity access.

Management Tools

So right about now, you’re probably asking, “Well, what about all those other management tools that Oracle has?” Often you’ll find there’s some level of confusion about what all these tools are, how to differentiate between them, and of course when to use which one. Let’s spend some time discussing that now.

First, the main point of differentiation between Cloud Control and the other Oracle management tools such as Database Control (DB Control) and Fusion Middleware Control (FMW Control) is the architecture. Cloud Control is designed to manage your entire data center, and as such it has a much more robust, multi-tier architecture than you’ll find in the other tools.

Second, the other management tools are scaled-down tools that generally connect to only a single environment at a time, rather than giving you the much broader data center–wide vision of your environment. As an example, DB Control can connect to only a single Oracle database at a time. If you want to use DB Control to manage or monitor another Oracle database, you have to first disconnect from the original database before connecting to the new one. In fact, if you don’t do that, Oracle will do it for you automatically.

Finally, there are some incompatibilities between the different tools. For example, when you create an Oracle database by using the Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA), you will be asked whether you want the database to be managed centrally (via EM12c) or locally (via DB Control). It’s an either/or decision;  you can’t choose both. This incompatibility reaches its zenith with the OMR. When you install EM12c, you are prompted for the location of the repository. (The installer does not create the database for you; it simply prompts you to point to the location of an existing Oracle database somewhere in your environment.) If the database you point the installer to has been configured by DBCA to be locally managed by DB Control, you will in fact get an error from the installer indicating that the database is already locally managed. (The installer does give you the command to remove the DB Control configuration if you so choose, but won’t actually execute the command for you.)

On a final note, at the time of writing this chapter, Oracle has announced that DB Control will be desupported in database releases after 11.2. Although we don’t know yet what the new product will be called, Oracle notes, “In future Oracle Database releases, basic database management will be available through a streamlined management tool, while extensive management capabilities will exist through the latest Oracle Database plug-in deployed from Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control” (see Note 1484775.1 on My Oracle Support for details).

Command-Line Tools

In addition to the GUI that most users of EM12c will use for their day-to-day work, Oracle provides two command-line tools that you need to become familiar with:

• Enterprise Manager Command Line Interface (EMCLI): This tool is largely used for scripting operations that might need to be repeated. It is a tool often used by consulting companies that make a business out of configuring EM12c, who thus have a need to execute the same operations repeatedly across different customers. EMCLI can be installed on any computer (not necessarily the OMS or OMR) simply by downloading the tool via the Cloud Control Setup menu and then following the installation instructions. Not all operations that can be performed through the GUI can be performed with EMCLI, however.
• Enterprise Manager Control (EMCTL): This utility is used for a variety of tasks, the most important of which are starting, stopping, and checking the status of the OMS, agent, and Cloud Control itself. It is also used to secure/unsecure agents and the OMS, starting and stopping blackouts and other operations.

Repository Users

In terms of database users, the most important user in an EM12c installation is the SYSMAN user. The SYSMAN user has been around for a number of releases now. It is basically the owner of the database schema containing the repository. In many ways, it is akin to the SYS user in an Oracle database, and as such, should not be used apart from the first time you create another Super Administrator account (see Chapter 4 for more details on Super Administrator accounts).

Apart from the SYSMAN account, other database users are created in the repository during repository creation or upgrade. These include the following:

• CLOUD_ENGINE_USER and CLOUD_SWLIB_USER are used to perform cloud operations.
• MGMT_VIEW is used for report generation.
• SYSMAN_APM, SYSMAN_MDS, and SYSMAN_OPSS are metadata schemas for Fusion Middleware components.
• SYSMAN_BIP is used for Business Intelligence (BI) Publisher integration.
• SYSMAN_RO is a general-purpose, read-only user.

Not much detail is provided in the Oracle documentation on these accounts. Suffice it to say, though, that these are all special accounts that you should not drop. Nor should you change their passwords.

Repository Views

Information about administrators, targets, metrics, blackouts, and jobs is all kept in the Oracle Management Repository in a group of repository views. Although the information in these views is obviously used by the Cloud Control console to display that information to you, it can also be used in other ways, primarily by a programmer building extensibility on top of the Enterprise Manager product. As a plug-in developer, for example, you may want to extend Enterprise Manager to manage your own, custom-developed targets, or indeed expand on the target types that Oracle provides out of the box. You may also want to write your own scripts to query historical data from these views, or build your own custom reports to run from SQL Developer or other products. Clearly, a chapter on the Enterprise Manager architecture is not the place to drill into gory details on how to do all these things, but it is worthwhile to understand what these repository views are and how to find more information about them.

The repository views are documented as part of the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Extensibility Programmer’s Reference (you can access this from the EM12c documentation located at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/index.htm). Chapter 18 of that online reference details the use of those views, along with a complete listing of the views displaying the column names for each view.

Communication Flow

When you first start using a product such as Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, one of the areas of greatest confusion is just how communications flow between the various parts of the product. Essentially, you need to understand three areas: the protocols involved, the ports that are being used, and whether firewalls are being used.

Authentication in EM12c

With the new pluggable framework that is available to you in the EM12c release, you now have more options as far as authentication is concerned. The framework accepts a range of pluggable authentication schemes, enabling you to choose the methods that are most suitable to your environment. Because EM12c relies on Oracle’s WebLogic Server for external authentication, any authentication method that WLS supports can be used to authenticate to EM12c. Supported authentication methods include the following:

• Repository-based authentication: In this default authentication option that you might be familiar with from previous releases of Enterprise Manager, you are prompted for a username and password. Standard password options—such as password lifetime, password grace, number of failed attempts, and password complexity—are available with this authentication method.
• Single sign-on authentication: If you use single sign-on (SSO) authentication in your enterprise, you can register those SSO credentials as an administrator in EM12c. You can then use those credentials to access the Cloud Control console.
• Oracle Access Manager SSO authentication: Oracle Access Manager (OAM) is the SSO solution supplied with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware product. Again, if you are using OAM SSO, you can register those credentials as an administrator in EM12c and use them to access the console.
• Enterprise User Security authentication: EUS allows you to create and store enterprise users and roles as directory objects in a directory server compliant with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). You can then use EMCTL to set some properties to allow you to drill into those databases without displaying the standard logon pages.
• LDAP authentication: In previous releases of Enterprise Manager, LDAP authentication was allowed, but it was restricted to Oracle’s LDAP solution, Oracle Internet Directory (OID). In the 12c release, that has now been extended to allow you to use Microsoft’s Active Directory product in addition to OID.

Summary

This chapter has introduced you to the major architectural components of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: the Cloud Control console, the Oracle Management Agent, the Oracle Management Service, the Oracle Management Repository, and plug-ins. You’ve looked at options for deploying this architecture and the authentication methods you can use to connect to EM12c. This chapter also covered the protocols, ports, and firewalls used by EM12c, so you’re now ready to drill into the installation of the product in more detail. That’s the subject of our next chapter.