Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 5 (12.1.0.5) – Just Born

em-12cOracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 5 (12.1.0.5) was announced a few days ago. I woke up today and checked the interwebs and it’s actually available for download.

I must admit I’m a little nervous about the upgrade. I had a few bad times with upgrades in the early days of Grid Control and Cloud Control and that has left me with a little bit of voodoo lurking in the back of my mind. The last couple of upgrades have been really easy, so I’m sure it will be fine, but that voodoo…

I’ll download it now and do a clean install. Then do a couple of practice upgrades. If all that goes well, I’ll schedule a date to sacrifice a chicken, raise a zombie from the dead to do my bidding, then do the real upgrade.

Cheers

Tim…

Update. Looking at the certification matrix, the repository is now certified on 12.1.0.2, as well as 11.2.0.4 and 11.2.0.3.

Update 2. Pete mentioned in the comments that 12.1.0.2 has been certified for the Cloud Control repository since march, with some restrictions. So it’s not new to this release. See the comments for details.

Update 3. Remember to download from edelivery.oracle.com (in a couple of days) for your production installations. Apparently there is a difference to the license agreement.

Cloud Control : 12.1.0.7 Plugin Patch

I applied some of the 12.1.0.7 plugin patches to our Cloud Control installation today. We already have Cloud Control 12.1.0.4 installed, so this was just a case of updating the plugins.

Here’s a quick overview of what I did.

  • Backup up everything! Database and file system.
  • Setup > Extensibility > Self Update
  • Download the latest versions of the plugins. The minimum you can really get away with is “Oracle Database 12.1.0.7”,  “Oracle Cloud Framework 12.1.0.2” and “Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.1.0.7”. The Cloud Framework plugin is a dependency for the FWM plugin. Obviously, grab the extra plugins if you need them…
  • Setup > Extensibility > Plugins
  • Do a “Deploy On > Management Server” for the plugins you’ve downloaded. These require OMS downtime, so you will be monitoring progress using “./emctl status oms -details” from the “$OMS_HOME/bin” directory.
  • Wait until it is all running again.
  • Do a “Deploy On > Management Agent” for the DB and FMW plugins on just the cloud control server. I wanted to know it was all fine on this server before pushing out the updates to the agents on the monitored hosts.
  • Convince yourself nothing weird is happening.
  • Do a “Deploy On > Management Agent” for the DB plugin on any monitored database severs. Where possible I did Dev environments in one pass. Test environments in a second pass, then Prod environments.
  • Do a “Deploy On > Management Agent” for the FMW plugin on any monitored WebLogic severs. Once again, Dev, Test, Prod.

The plugin deploys to the OMS are a bit slow, but the deploys to the agents are pretty quick. Numbers will vary depending on your kit.

I much prefer the plugin patches to the main Cloud Control OMS and Agent patches as we (the DBAs) don’t have root or sudo access on the servers, so when we do the full-on patches we end up swamping the sysadmins with requests to run “root.sh” scripts. We don’t have to do that for the plugin patches.

Cheers

Tim…

Grid Control (10.2.0.5) on OEL 4.8 x86_64…

I recently managed to screw up my Grid Control VM, so I was forced to reinstall it. I’d not written an article on it since 10gR2, as I’ve just been applying patches since then. Faced with a new install I decided to go x86_64 and do clean install direct to 10gR5.

I used OEL 4.8 as it is the highest supported OS version. I went with the standard new database installation as I can’t really be bothered messing about with an 11g database as the repository. I think of Grid Control in the same way I think of Oracle Apps. They are shrink-wrapped products and I try to keep them as basic as possible. Anything that can present a problem, usually will.

I must admit to liking Grid Control as a product, but the installation and configuration is truely horrible. At every step of the way you are waiting for the next disaster. There are just too many working parts and it eats resources like nobodies business. Am I the only person who thinks the infrastructure is overly complicated for the job it is actually doing? I really hope the 11g version (if it is ever released) will be neater.

Cheers

Tim…