RE: Use EM 11g Grid Control (or 12c) versus opatch to save time with quarterly PSUs?

From: Peter Sharman <pete.sharman_at_oracle.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2012 09:09:51 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <256f28ea-d279-43c4-8df5-91d17ae13efb_at_default>



Dana

I'll leave any comments on the politics of the situation to others.

Purely from a product perspective, I would see no reason to upgrade to EM 11g now that 12c has been released and out for a while. The additional functionality you get with the 12c release is a huge step forward, and since you can upgrade from 10.2.0.5 direct to 12c, you might as well take advantage of that. To take the patching issue that you mention alone, there are new out of the box procedures to perform mass database upgrades in parallel, minimum downtime patching for single instance environments, FMW domain cloning and topology scaling, and WebLogic application mass deployment, just as some examples. And of course, much more in other areas which I won't go into because it'll make me sound like a salesman. :)

Pete

Pete Sharman
Principal Product Manager
Enterprise Manager Product Suite
33 Benson Crescent CALWELL ACT 2905 AUSTRALIA Phone: +61262924095 | | Fax: +61262925183 | | Mobile: +61414443449 

"Controlling developers is like herding cats."
Kevin Loney, Oracle DBA Handbook

"Oh no, it's not, it's much harder than that!"
Bruce Pihlamae, long term Oracle DBA

-----Original Message-----
From: Dana Nibby [mailto:dananrg_at_yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, 20 July 2012 6:39 PM
To: oracle-l
Subject: Use EM 11g Grid Control (or 12c) versus opatch to save time with quarterly PSUs?

For a shop with 30 instances on a dozen hosts, would it make sense to use Grid Control EM 11g or EM 12c to deploy PSUs? Is one more reliable than the other? Our approach is opatch. And each quarter it takes much labor, time, and frustration to complete. We have an aging but functioning EM 10g Grid Control infrastructure. Never tried to use it for patching. But we have the diagnostic + tuning packs for our instances. So we should be licensed to use this technology for PSUs. When I've suggested we upgrade to EM 11g or EM 12c I typically get a response of the variety "we don't have time for that" (e.g. researching, testing, and then deploying EM 11g or 12c). My opinion? We don't have time *not* to do this. It's an investment in efficiency and I take the long view. It gives me no pleasure, and much pain, to repeatedly hear "we don't have time to learn X" when X is something that will improve efficiency, customer service, excellence, etc.

Sound familiar to anyone? If so, how have you played it short of finding another gig? I may try to track all staff hours involved with getting July PSUs completed to have some baseline metrics--everyone from the DBA team (reading about quirks and idiosyncracies of various PSUs on particular platforms/Oracle releases) to sysadmins to ops to managers, etc. In the time it takes to coordinate and execute the work using opatch, I can't help but wonder if we could have set-up at least EM 11g Grid Control in preparation for the next quarter. For now, I'm trying to socialize a January 1st, 2013 date to deploy EM 11g or EM 12c for patching and other goodness. You know, try to implement it, at least on some Production Floor dev and test boxes, when things have slowed down and most people (here in the U.S.) will be out of the office.

It may be that patching with EM 11g or EM 12c isn't patching nirvana. I'm not sure precisely how many staff hours (and frustration) it might save. Would love to hear personal stories here. But I'll settle for incremental improvement so we can move on to work higher up the value chain. If all my instances got moved to The Cloud, for instance, patching is a task I wouldn't miss.

Finally, are there cases in which folks would recommend sticking with opatch versus applying patches with Grid/Cloud Control? I imagine in very small shops using opatch would be fine. But in shops as large as the one I've described or larger--when DBAs are managing hundreds or thousands of instances--I can't imagine using opatch. Not unless it is fully scripted in some way.

If no one bites, and persists in saying "we don't have time for this", I'm going to make time on my home sandbox and work everything out there on my own time. Feels like The Right Thing To Do. Because an operational DBA group could always say "we don't have time for X." It's a bit like saying  "I don't have money to invest in a retirement plan." Decades pass and then you find you have to work forever...

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l


--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
Received on Fri Jul 20 2012 - 11:09:51 CDT

Original text of this message