Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.3 Silent Upgrade

A few days ago I put out a post called Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.3 Vagrant Build. In a comment on that post Dinesh said,

“Would like to see the silent upgrade from oem12c to oem13c upgrade post from you”

I normally try to keep on top of upgrades, so I’ve never done a jump bigger than one version, but I was checking through the documentation, and assuming it’s a supported start version, there isn’t much difference between the upgrades from most versions, so I thought I would give it a go. As I mentioned in the last post, I already had a GUI upgrade article.

I didn’t have a silent upgrade though. I do now. 🙂

In order to try this out I did a Vagrant build of Cloud Control 12cR5, to give me an easy way to get a clean starting point. You can see that here. If you want to practice the upgrade, it’s a really easy way to do it.

I’ve left the agent upgrade using the Cloud Control interface, but there is an example of how to do it silently using WLST here. It’s pretty simple.

So not only did I not expect to be writing that post a few days ago, but I certainly didn’t expect to be writing this one. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13.3 Vagrant Build

A little short of a year ago I knocked up a Vagrant build to prepare an environment for practising Cloud Control 13.3 installations and upgrades. This just automated the creation of the environment and installation of the database, ready for me to start playing around with the Cloud Control bit. At the time I released these articles.

I didn’t mention anything about the Vagrant build as it didn’t do much more than build the database, so it didn’t seem worth mentioning. It was just a convenience for me.

More recently someone pointed it out on Twitter and I made a note to myself to “finish it off” and make it do a full silent build, then kind-of forgot again.

A few days ago I had a self-induced problem with our Cloud Control server, and I realised I didn’t have the best plan of action for a complete rebuild scenario. I had backups, so I didn’t need to do a rebuild, but that doesn’t stop me wanting to be able to do it, so I did the following things…

I scripted a silent build of the work environment we use. I put together a general article to show how to do a silent build of a simple installation too. If you’re interested you can see it here.

I wrote some EMCLI scripts to do most of the tasks I needed for a complete rebuild. We already use EMCLI for some of the stuff, like jobs, but I filled in the gaps where I had been a bit lazy. Those are all checked into a company Git repo, and they are quite specific to what we need, but there are some basic EMCLI examples available here, if you are interested in getting into EMCLI.

Finally, I made my Vagrant build a fully automated Cloud Control 13.3 build on Oracle database 18c. According to the certification matrix, Oracle 19c is not yet certified for the repository database (but someone on Oracle-L said this certification is imminent (See Update)). If you are interested in playing around with Vagrant, you can find it here. I’ve managed to get away with 6G of memory, but that makes it chronically slow. The more memory you can throw at it the better. 🙂

I didn’t really expect to be revisiting this stuff a year down the line, but it was born out of necessity, or at least necessity for my peace of mind. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: The OMS is now supported on Oracle database 19c.

Grid Control 11g Installation… Success…

Well a new day and a fresh pair of eyes and it all went well. I was out this afternoon so I started the final bit of the installation running and it had completed successfully when I got home. 🙂

I’m not totally sure what was causing the previous problems. I had been taking snapshots of my VM at regular intervals over the last couple of days and I guess something must have been dodgy because when I threw it all away and started again from scratch it worked fine. Here is the installation guide listing all the steps:

So does this success change my opinion of this release? Not at all. The installation is a mess and I think Oracle really do need to have a shrink-wrapped install, even if it is a 8G download. It would reduce the barrier to entry and I just think it feels a little poor that you have to manually install a bunch of patches before you can get the product working. Makes me wince a little.

Cheers

Tim…

Grid Control 11g Installation Failure…

I’ve spent the last couple of days failing to install OEM Grid Control 11g on OEL 5.5 x86-64 with a 11gR2 database for the repository. The installation process is horrid. You have to manually install and patch the database and middleware software before starting the GC installation. So you end up with a whopping 7.1G of software, not including patches and the OS.

The docs are not ideal. There is a lot of cross-referencing to bugs, patches and metalink notes, which means I’ve often had about 10 browser tabs open while performing the installation. I can only assume that somewhere in the mish-mash of the docs I’ve missed something out.

I feel really disappointed with the installation process for this release. In my opinion there should be a single installation that includes the middleware, database and all necessary patches. I like to think of GC as a shrink-wrapped product I can install separate to everything else and leave alone. Not any more…

I’m off to ODTUG this week, so I’m not sure I can be bothered to waste more time on this until I get back. Perhaps someone there will be able to explain to me what the hell is going on with it.

Cheers

Tim…