Hiatus is Over

I have not posted for several months because I got carried away with the idea of not only doing OEM 12c on Amazon's Cloud, but also to do that as a business model. That is, implement OEM 12c on a public or private cloud as a managed service. There is a LOT to consider beyond the technical. I don't have an MBA so it took some time to think through all the business considerations, and then had the outline looked over by others who do have a business background.

I ended up writing a white paper and 30 page business outline on what I called Business Transaction Assurance (BTA). In short, BTA is simply the implementation of OEM 12c and all the associated packs, plug-ins, etc. However, all of the features are broken into levels of assurance from the very basic (e.g. OS and database monitoring) to the advance levels using RUEI, synthetic transactions, etc. for the purpose of instrumenting business transactions end-to-end. A customer could buy into the level of BTA that is needed.

There are several conceptual weaknesses in the outline which will require some reworking of the business plan, but the overall concepts are sound enough for presentation. One of the main weaknesses is that I'm not sure how applicable an Oracle-centric management and monitoring solution is to small businesses who operate on a shoestring. I tried to think in terms of multitenancy to reduce costs. And it might work in some regards, but as you know OEM is not designed to be a multitenant application. It would only be a work around and would take a full proof of concept project to determine to what degree it would or wouldn't work, and then determining if targeting small businesses makes sense at all.

I will be talking with several established Oracle Partners in the next few weeks to determine their interest in offering OEM 12c as a managed service. It takes a lot to start a new practice, and becoming a certified Oracle Partner for a specialty like OEM is only one step. 

You can pick up a copy of the business outline here.

Please feel free to send me your comments at jim@jimbolesdesigns.com

Oracle Cloud Control 12c on Amazon Web Services

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c can run on Amazon's cloud services if you know a few tricks. You can download a copy of the how-to guide at OEMonEC2partTwo.pdf. It is in draft form. Over the next few weeks a bit more will be outlined before I move onto part three of this series. You can obtain part one here.

The highlights of  Part Two are:

• Brief over of  features and architecture OEM CC 12c.
• Extensive links to Part One of the series and other sources of necessary information to run an Oracle database repository (OMR) in an AWS EC2 environment.
• Set up of the Amazon Machine Image to satisfy CC prerequisites.
• Extensive discussion of  Name Resolution to enable CC to run in a DHCP environment.
• Scripts for dynamic Hosts file management.
• Firewall configuration to enable the CC architectural pieces to communicate in an EC2 context.
• Debugging tips if the installation goes not as planned.
• How to configure CC security credentials.

 If anyone how has already done this, or, will use this guide to do so I'd like to hear from you.

DB Startup Fails on WORKAREA_SIZE_POLICY

A short posting just as an FYI in case you hit this Oracle startup error. I couldn't find any web post or MOS post covering this error so maybe this will help some one else hitting this nuance error.

When using the init parameters MEMORY_MAX_TARGET and/or MEMORY_TARGET you may get and error on startup the these are incompatible with WORKAREA_SIZE_POLICY. If this occurs simply unset that policy parameter. On startup it will then be set to the default value of AUTO which is the most common value. Setting it to MANUAL does not work.

That was my experience.
Just an FYI.

Security On Top Of Security

Regretfully, we have to put up with security invading our life maybe more than any danger that might occur.  This is true in our personal as well as public life. Recently I spent the day pulling my hair out because I couldn't achieve a very novice accomplishment like turning apache on and accessing a web page. More specifically, port 80 was not accessible while ping and ssh worked... well of course, they are on different ports.

In AWS EC2 parlance the Security Group must allow port 80 to be open.... and it was. I looked at it 10 times over 12 hours doubling checking again and again. It wasn't a mistake at on the apache-level, EC2-configuration, Selinux, iptable conflicts, host files, OS file or group permissions, file ownership, httpd.conf file, unavailable ports, the setroubleshoot service, or anything I could find on the EC2 forum.

It was just a firewall, a second frigging firewall... can you believe it. The Red Hat firewall is set up for you by default. My focus was on the EC2 firewall not knowing that RH already has one running by default. In my case I was using Oracle's Linux, but you always have to remember that it is a RH derivative.

What's my excuse for not knowing this?.... In the parlance of Dr. McCoy... "Damn it Jim, I'm a DBA not a RH nerd."

And I'll be damned if I'm going to make changes to the iptables... port by port, even when I did see a web comment or two in that direction. The syntax is totally greek even for a geek!

Actually, it is quite easy to turn off the RH firewall without making changes to the iptables. The last command supposedly does a permanent disable.

# service iptables save
# service iptables stop
# chkconfig iptables off

But that's not all... oh no, it isn't that simple. After another hour of frustration I needed a dope slap and good. Not because I'm a dope, but because I needed to wake up from 10 hours of security hell frying my brain. The final solution was to turn off IPV4 and IPV6.

# service ip6tables save
# service ip6tables stop
# chkconfig ip6tables off

Am I going to turn the RH firewall back on? What do you think.





11.2.0.3.2 GI PSU 2 on ASM Based Standalone DB

Applying the GI PSU 2 on a vanilla database is fairly easy. However, patching a standalone database in an Oracle Restart and ASM configuration, which uses Role Separation, and running OPatch in auto mode is a little more challenging. At some point the OPatch auto mode will be clear sailing, but given this configuration there were bumps in the road.

The notes provided in the following link may save you from a sleepless night if your database does not come up after applying the patch.

Good luck, and let me know if you have comments.

GI PSU 2 Apply

MOS HTML version instead of Flash

Initially the Flash version of My Oracle Support (MOS) was disliked by many. I got use to it and it has improved over time. At times though it would be nice to still have an HTML version. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there is an HTML version. The URL is http://supporthtml.oracle.com

Highlights of the Installation and Configuration Companion

The Installation and Configuration Companion contains the following topics

•    Quick Start Guides for concise list of steps with links to in depth references.
•    How to obtain access to Oracle Support at a very low cost
•    How to make an EC2 IP/EIP persistant thru server stop/starts
•    How to validate an Amazon Machine Image for an Oracle database
•    How to use YUM during the installation
•    How to create your own server init/rc startup script
•    How to set up ssh, VNC, firewall tunneling and how to solve problems when connecting to your server
•    How to install the Grid Infrastructure (GI) using role separation for security and compliance
•    How to allocate EC2 storage for a production sized OEM repository server, including setting up swap, temp, and an Oracle Fast Recovery Area
•    How to configure Oracle's ASM with GI troubleshooting techniques
•    How to troubleshoot a failed installation and how to start over
•    Bug fixes for: Oracle supplied AMI, Oracle install process, and a fix for ElasticFox enabling it to run in new versions of Firefox
•    How to test a recovery on the EC2 storage and Oracle database levels

An overview of the following important topics

•    EC2 security/firewall setup
•    EC2 storage
•    Setting up EC2 command line tools
•    Extensive list of important ASM and EC2 topics
•    Brief outline of the GI services
•    Brief outline of GI role separation
•    An FDISK primer