Dell PowerFlex Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager: Simplify the Oracle management experience
Fri, 03 Feb 2023 15:17:53 -0000
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Oracle databases are critical components for most business operations. Many organizations have hundreds, if not, thousands of Oracle databases running across on-premises and public cloud locations. Managing and monitoring these databases, including the applications and the underlying infrastructure associated with them, can pose a challenge to IT providers. The Oracle Enterprise Manager (Oracle EM) management tool can help reduce these challenges by enabling users to monitor and manage Oracle IT infrastructure from a single console. It provides a single dashboard for managing all Oracle database deployments, whether in the data center or in the cloud.
The Dell Technologies plug-in for Oracle EM uses Dell OpenManage technology to allow Oracle DBAs to monitor and proactively set alerts for Dell PowerEdge and Dell PowerFlex systems using the Oracle EM console for a proactive approach to data center management. In addition to Dell infrastructure management, the plug-in also supports mapping of database workloads to Dell hardware for quicker fault detection.
What is Oracle EM?
Oracle EM is a single-pane-of-glass graphical user interface (GUI) management tool. Oracle EM is an Oracle flagship management product for the whole Oracle stack. It provides a comprehensive monitoring and management solution for Oracle database and applications including Oracle Engineered Systems deployed in the cloud or on-premises. Both large and small enterprises running Oracle products rely on Oracle EM for everyday management of mission-critical applications.
The capabilities of Oracle EM include:
- Enterprise monitoring
- Application management
- Database management
- Middleware management
- Hardware and virtualization management
- Heterogeneous (Non-Oracle) management
- Cloud management
- Lifecycle management
- Application performance management
- Application quality management
What is Oracle EM Plug-in?
An Oracle EM plug-in defines a new type of target that can be monitored by Oracle EM. A target can be defined as an entity that can be monitored within an organization. This entity can be an application running on a server, the server itself, the network, or a storage device.
Oracle EM makes managing target instances simple by enabling you to add a new target to the management framework from the Oracle EM console. After adding a new target, you can take advantage of Oracle Enterprise Manager’s monitoring and administrative features for that target and others.
What is Dell PowerFlex Platform?
Dell PowerFlex is a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform that combines storage, compute, and networking resources with industry-standard hardware. It empowers organizations to harness the power of software and embrace change while achieving consistently predictable outcomes for mission-critical workloads. Dell PowerFlex is a modern platform that delivers extreme flexibility, massive performance, and linear scalability while simplifying complete infrastructure management and boosting IT agility. It is the ideal foundation for organizations that are looking to modernize their mission-critical applications like Oracle, consolidate heterogeneous workloads, and build agile, private, and hybrid clouds. It is also optimized and validated for a broad set of enterprise workloads including Oracle database, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP HANA, Cassandra, MongoDB, to Splunk, SAS, and Elastic Search.
There are several options for a PowerFlex deployment, as described in the following table:
Deployment Type | Description |
Hyperconverged |
|
Two-layer |
|
Hybrid hyperconverged |
|
PowerFlex compute-only nodes |
|
PowerFlex storage-only nodes |
|
What is Dell Plug-in for Oracle EM and what does it do?
Dell Plug-in for Oracle EM provides a proactive approach to managing hardware for database servers such as the PowerEdge and monitoring the PowerFlex two-layer deployment components such as SDC and SDS and their sub-components through the integration with Dell OpenManage and PowerFlex gateway. This plug-in allows DBAs to discover, inventory, and monitor the database infrastructure running on Dell PowerFlex platform. Because Oracle maps databases to server host names, the DBAs can proactively monitor for any potential database performance issues by drilling down on the SDC nodes or SDS nodes.
After launching the Oracle EM GUI, DBAs can navigate to the dashboard of the managed target, in this case the PowerFlex, to get an overall view of the PowerFlex system including the PowerFlex gateway IP, cluster storage capacity, SDC nodes health alerts, and the storage overall performance.
This plug-in also provides DBAs the ability to launch the PowerFlex management console from the Oracle EM console to further investigate issues or to perform other PowerFlex tasks such as troubleshooting, configuration, or management of the PowerFlex components.
This release of the plug-in provides Dell server hardware and storage monitoring for Oracle databases running on Dell PowerFlex. More features will be available in later releases. Not only will more features be available, but the plug-in will be available on other Dell platforms as well.
To learn about more features, see the Dell Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager User Guide.
The following screenshots provide examples of Oracle EM in action with PowerFlex infrastructure.
Figure 1. Oracle EM - Dell Plug-in Dashboard
Figure 2. Oracle EM - Dell Plug-in - Compute node Capacity tab
Figure 3. Oracle EM - Dell Plug-in - Compute node Latency tab
Figure 4. Oracle EM - Dell Plug-in - Compute node Throughput tab
Figure 5. Oracle EM - Dell Plug-in - Storage node health
Summary
To improve our customer business outcomes, Dell Technologies continues to innovate and integrate with third-party software. With future releases of the Dell Plug-in for Oracle EM more features will be available to enable the DBAs to easily manage their Oracle database environments on Dell platforms.
Additional resources
Dell Plug-in for Oracle EM Release Notes
Dell Plug-in for Oracle EM Installation Guide