Automation of regular tasks

I am looking into automating regular tasks, and wondered what others do. I am thinking of database critical patches, and weblogic installs to start with, because they are things we do a lot.

We are going to look into using enterprise manager, but presumably we need to license weblogic server management pack to use OEM to install weblogic. Also I am not sure about how it would cope with the configuration that is typically required after a weblogic install.

We tend to have separate homes at each CPU version of the database so we can upgrade different DBs on the same server at different times, and to minimise downtime. Can OEM take care of this for us?

I did try using ansible, which I liked, except you can only define one user, which means doing everything as root and using sudo to switch to oracle, or doing everything as oracle and using sudo to run root.sh, neither of which I really like.

I note that http://oraclemiddlewareblog.com/2015/02/25/weblogic-domain-running-minutes-using-docker/ looks interesting, but would probably be no use for a database install, so would have to have different technologies for different areas of the stack which would increase complexity.

What do you use?

Thanks

PaulH

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