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An Oracle White Paper April 2010 Cloud Management Using Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g

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Page 1: Cloud Management Using Oracle Enterprise Manager 11 ghosteddocs.ittoolbox.com/em_us_en_wp_cloud.pdf · Cloud Management Using Oracle Enterprise Manager 11 g. Oracle White Paper—Cloud

An Oracle White Paper

April 2010

Cloud Management Using Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g

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Oracle White Paper—Cloud Management Using Enterprise Manager

Disclaimer

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes

only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or

functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and

timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of

Oracle.

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Executive Overview........................................................................... 1

Introduction ....................................................................................... 1

Oracle’s Strategy............................................................................... 4

Enterprise Evolution to Cloud ........................................................ 4

Private, Public and Hybrid Clouds ................................................. 5

Oracle’s Cloud computing Platform ............................................... 6

Cloud Management ........................................................................... 7

Agility and Flexibility ...................................................................... 8

Unified View, Centralized Control ................................................ 12

Application Visibility ..................................................................... 15

Transparency .............................................................................. 18

Conclusion ...................................................................................... 20

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Executive Overview

Wikipedia defines cloud computing as "Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby

shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-

demand, like a public utility.” Maximizing the benefits of cloud computing requires thorough

understanding of IT assets and relationships between various infrastructure components, high

level of automation and mitigating security and compliance risks. Oracle offers a

comprehensive set of platform and management technologies and best practices that can help

enterprise data centers evolve to become private cloud service providers delivering IT services

with high efficiency, quality of service, responsiveness, pay-per-use, elastic scalability, security

and compliance.

Introduction

Several organizations have been exploring how to realize the economic benefits of cloud

computing within their own datacenter. Whether it is faster provisioning on demand, agile

resource scheduling based on policies, chargeback rules to ensure optimal utilization of

resources or more control over the environment, IT is moving from reactive to proactive to

predictive approach for data center management. Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle’s

flagship products for systems management provides single, integrated solution for testing,

deploying, operating, monitoring, diagnosing, and resolving problems in today’s complex IT

environments. It offers a simple, scalable solution for managing the Oracle stack, from

applications to disk, in cloud environments. It manages everything from the hypervisor to the

operating system, database, and application tier.

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Figure 1: Oracle Enterprise Manager

Oracle Enterprise Manager’s broad range of capabilities includes performance and availability

monitoring, configuration and compliance management, patching, provisioning, and

performance diagnostics and tuning. But at the same time, it’s an extensible tool: so while

customers get comprehensive management for Oracle technology, there are connectors and

plug-ins to integrate with third-party systems. The plug-ins can manage third party IT

components such as Cisco and Juniper firewall and EMC storage, while the connectors enable

Oracle Enterprise Manager to share information with other management systems like IBM

Tivoli, CA Unicenter, HP OpenView, and more1. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides the most

1 For more details, please visit http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/extensions/index.html

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comprehensive management soution for Oracle’s cloud platform for both private as well as

public cloud uses.

With Oracle Enterprise Manager, we are now able to meet corporate standards 100% of the time. And, our pre-patched gold

images, enabled by Oracle Enterprise Manager, save time and resources.”

Alok Arora, Architecture Group, NetApp

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Oracle’s Strategy

Oracle has played a leading role in enabling a more agile and efficient enterprise IT environment with

pioneering work in the area of grid computing. As enterprises get ready to take advantage of the cloud

computing paradigm, Oracle wants to ensure that our platform and management technologies not only

support but also enable that evolution. Oracle provides customers a comprehensive and complete

software stack—starting with hypervisor, OS, database, middle tier all the way to enterprise

applications—to build shared, scalable, elastic and flexible cloud infrastructure and services. In

addition, Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a very rich and scalable management framework

providing a unified view of the enterprise cloud. One example is Oracle On Demand with 3.6 million

end users: Oracle uses its own platform and management technologies to build and manage a SaaS

cloud in its data center that hosts Oracle Applications such as Oracle CRM, which are available to

users over the Web.

Enterprise Evolution to Cloud

Oracle envisages the journey to the cloud as a phased one. Earlier in this decade, transition from

traditional silo’d infrastructure with physical dedicated silos to grid computing allowed improved

utilization of physical resources, better scalability for peak loads and lowered management costs.

Figure 2: Silo’d to Grid Computing

Oracle has played a leading role in the area of grid computing with products such as Real Application

Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, Coherence, Application Grid and Oracle Enterprise

Manager Grid Control to enable customers to create and manage a very flexible and scalable

infrastructure. Cloud computing encapsulates the behavioral characteristics of grid and utility

computing concepts and introduces a platform that unifies the benefits associated with each of them.

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Much like grid, the cloud consists of large pools of shared computing resources that take advantage of

complementary workload peaks to enable consolidation and to work together to fulfill a customer

request. The cloud service provider maintains a seemingly unlimited pool of resources that consumers

can tap into on-demand and pay for in the utility style – much as how traditional utilities such as

power, water, telephone services, etc. are delivered and consumed. Users need not have knowledge of,

expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them.

Consumers are charged on a pay-as-you-go basis, often on an hourly or monthly basis. This lowers the

upfront capital expenditure and ongoing operational expenditure costs.

Private, Public and Hybrid Clouds

Private or internal cloud concept implies running shared services hosted in the in-house enterprise data

center as opposed to a public cloud that runs them as a publicly shared infrastructure. In other words,

with private cloud enterprises want to transform their existing IT infrastructure to provide cloud

capabilities so they can satisfy user demands without compromising security/compliance and without

giving up control. This idea is gaining increasing acceptance among large enterprises and according to a

recent Forrester survey, 44% of approximately 1000 enterprises surveyed reported plans to implement

some type of private cloud in the next few years.2

Figure 3: Enterprise Evolution to Cloud

2 Enterprise and SMB Hardware Forrester Survey, North America and Europe, Q3 2008

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However, there is no denying the fact that there could be occasional demands for resources that could

exceed the enterprise data center capacity and thus there is a need to link private and public cloud so

that enterprises can tap into the public cloud in a more controlled manner. This concept is often

referred to as “cloud bursting” and it implies a controlled interaction of private and public cloud

offerings. “Hybrid cloud” and “federated cloud” are some of the terms that are used to describe this

interlinking of public and private clouds.

As customers look to further reduce IT costs by hosting shared services, consolidating workloads on

fewer physical resources and lowering IT administration costs, evolving from a grid to a cloud

paradigm looks attractive.

Converting existing data center investments into a private cloud allows IT to provide a more flexible,

agile and transparent environment to businesses. It also reduces administrative costs by allowing

business users to access cloud resources directly. On the other hand, customers looking to lower the

upfront CapEx costs for setting up new IT infrastructure can leverage public clouds. Eventually,

customers would want a hybrid model that’ll give the economies of scale and management simplicity of

a public cloud and better service level guarantees and security of a private cloud.

Oracle’s Cloud computing Platform

Figure 4: Oracle Cloud Platform

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Oracle offers a comprehensive set of technologies, both hardware and software, for building and

managing cloud environments. A cloud provider, be it internal enterprise IT or public cloud provider,

can use Oracle’s open, integrated and complete software stack—starting with hypervisor, OS, database,

middle tier all the way to enterprise applications to provide cloud services to business users and

customers.

Products such as Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, Coherence, and

Application Grid can enable Oracle customers to create a very flexible and scalable Platform as a

Service (PaaS) infrastructure. Oracle Sun servers, storage and network gear along with Oracle Linux,

Oracle Solaris, and Oracle VM virtualization technologies can enable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Oracle Enterprise Manager, with its rich and scalable management framework, provides a unified view

of the cloud infrastructure and helps unlock the full value of cloud computing—agility, elasticity and

reduced IT costs.

The lifecycle, performance, quality and configuration management of the infrastructure and the

platform is achieved by Oracle Enterprise Manager, which covers the entire stack from applications to

disk. Enterprise Manager Ops center, the latest addition to the family provides deep management of

the server and storage infrastructure layers.

In essence, Oracle delivers customers all the necessary building blocks to create their own cloud

environment and maximize the return of investment (ROI).

Cloud Management

Enterprise private cloud offers several benefits highlighted below. To reap the full benefits of cloud

computing enterprises need to choose the right management solution.

Figure 5: Private Cloud Benefits

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Oracle Enterprise Manager fulfills the needs of cloud management and provides the following

functionality:

Figure 6: Cloud Management using Enterprise Manager

Agility and Flexibility

A key benefit of cloud computing – especially from an enterprise perspective – is agility. Centralized IT

orgs are often not equipped to respond to dynamic user demands in a timely fashion, which could

impact go-to-market speed and lead to missed business opportunities. The cloud solves this problem

by enabling faster provisioning of IT resources and providing capacity on-demand.

Setting up the Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud infrastructure can consist of physical or virtual servers. In physical environments, IT usually sets

up racks of physical servers connected to a common storage pool.

In a sever-virtualized environment, cloud infrastructure primarily consists of server pools, storage and

network. A server pool is a grouping of Oracle VM servers that share common storage. Operations

such as live migration of Guest VMs can be performed within a server pool. Oracle Enterprise

Manager provides the ability to provision server pools and configure ISCSI or NFS/NAS storage areas

for them. Servers in the pool can be used to provision Guest VMs using Oracle VM Templates or ISO

images of operating systems. Administrators can view relationships among server pools, Oracle VM

servers, Guest VMs and application workloads running in the cloud environment.

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Figure 7: Oracle VM Management in Enterprise Manager

Bare Metal Provisioning of Oracle VM servers (hypervisors)

Oracle Enterprise Manager addresses the datacenter server farm challenge of provisioning servers

quickly, efficiently and making them operational in the cloud. Bare metal provisioning application

provides an automated, repeatable and reliable solution for unattended deployment of Oracle VM

hypervisors on a large number of servers. These servers are then registered in server pools and show

up as managed targets in the Oracle Enterprise Manager console.

Setting up Software Library

Software Library is a single repository in Oracle Enterprise Manager to store images that need to be

deployed in the cloud. Administrators can store Oracle VM Templates, software images and other

provisioning/patching components in the library. Objects in the Software Library can have attributes

such as version, type, owner, and creator. The backend repository for the Software Library can be a

filesystem or a database. Administrators need to setup storage for the Software Library before they can

use Oracle Enterprise Manager for lifecycle management.

Faster Provisioning with Oracle VM Templates

Once the infrastructure is set up, Enterprise manager offers capabilities Oracle VM Templates provide

an innovative approach to deploying a fully configured software stack by offering pre-installed and pre-

configured software images. Use of Oracle VM Templates eliminates the installation and configuration

costs, and reduces the ongoing maintenance costs helping organizations achieve faster time to market

and lower cost of operations. Oracle VM Templates of many key Oracle products are available for

download from Oracle technology network (OTN), including Oracle Database, Enterprise Linux,

Fusion Middleware, Seibel, and PeopleSoft. Using the Oracle Enterprise Manager console,

administrators can provision new servers from these templates, thereby significantly reducing the time

to roll out new software and services.

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Test to Production Lifecycle

Today’s agile software development practices have sped up the design and development of new

applications and yielded more rapid release cycles for new features. This has resulted in vastly increased

demand for rapid roll out of tested configurations to production to support quick iterations in

development cycles. With Oracle Enterprise Manager, it is possible to capture configurations from

Test environments as Oracle VM Templates and roll them out to Production.

Live Migration

Oracle VM provides the capability to move a virtual machine from one VM Server to another in a

matter of seconds. This capability can be used for planned maintenance of servers in the cloud without

disruption to services. It is also possible to balance application workloads by moving them from one

physical server to another to optimally utilize cloud infrastructure resources. The balancing can be

done based on metrics

Platform Provisioning

Assembly Builder

Assemblies extend the concept of Oracle VM Templates by allowing configuration metadata and

binaries of multi-tier applications to be packaged. For example, a 3-tier assembly can contain Oracle

HTTP server in the front-end, an Oracle Weblogic mid-tier (with the deployed application) and an

Oracle Database (with application data) at the backend. Assemblies can be instantiated to provision

application stacks within minutes. Administrators/designers can use the Assembly Builder tool to

introspect and bottle existing reference application deployments to construct assemblies.

Administrators can export assemblies into Oracle Enterprise Manager Software Library from where

they can be deployed in the cloud.

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Figure 8: Assembly Builder Studio

Customizing Assemblies

Customers can take Oracle shipped out-of-box assemblies and modify the default configuration as per

their best practices. They can then “bottle” up the assembly using the Assembly Builder tool for

deployment.

Provisioning On Demand

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a hot-pluggable and extensible provisioning framework through

deployment procedures, which are out-of-box best practices to orchestrate software deployment

workflows. Out-of-box deployment procedures are available for Database and Weblogic provisioning,

scaling in/out RAC clusters, applying critical security updates, etc. Deployment Procedures take into

account the reality that cloud environments are often different with varying levels of complexities and

dependencies across different tiers, but with the need to enforce operational best practices.

In a typical cloud environment, a lead administrator would perform the design time activity of

creating/customizing deployment procedures as per the deployment best practices, and other

administrators will execute these procedures on demand in a self-service manner.

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Middleware/Database as a Service

In the cloud, multiple applications/users/services can leverage a single, scalable database or

middleware infrastructure as a service. Oracle Enterprise Manager comes with out-of-box deployment

procedures to deploy Weblogic clusters and Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) Database in the

cloud following best practices for maximum availability. The procedures automate the configuration of

storage, networking and load balancers for the clusters. It is also possible to use automated procedures

to scale out and scale in RAC clusters by adding or removing instances for dynamic database capacity

in the cloud.

Figure 9: Enterprise Manager Driven RAC Provisioning

Unified View, Centralized Control

Dynamism in a cloud makes it much harder to maintain security and assurances through control over

hardware and software resources and changes that are taking place. One-click VM server provisioning

in virtualized environments can lead to VM server sprawl and difficulty in tracking what exists and who

owns what. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides comprehensive asset tracking and change detection

capabilities to allow greater control over the environment.

“Using standard gold images and EM based cloning we can ensure 100% compliance to standards and save 80% man hours

and cost”

Mario Lohner, Draxlmaier Group

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Figure 10: Cloud Configuration Management

Oracle Enterprise Manager discovers and stores configuration information for cloud resources and

allows administrators to have clear visibility into what they have. The reporting framework provides

out-of-box and custom reports for inventory tracking and compliance. Configuration comparisons and

drift analysis makes it easier to track changes and adhere to baselines and compliance standards.

Figure 11: Configuration Comparison

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Configuration Compliance

Cloud and Compliance are often treated as opposing forces. While cloud encourages dynamism,

Compliance enforces caution and control. For dynamic IT environments like the cloud, Oracle

Enterprise Manager provides automated IT controls to enforce configuration best practices and IT

compliance. The policy framework and drill-down reports can be used to enforce around 300 out-of-

box policies, which are evaluated automatically on an on-going basis. Administrators can define their

own policies or use out-of-box policy groups to map to CIS, SOX, COBIT, etc.

Figure 12: Compliance Policy Management

Real time Change Detection

Administrators can track changes to individual configuration properties in almost real-time, get alerts

for out-of-policy changes, detect authorized versus unauthorized changes, and prevent IT audit

problems. Change detection capabilities, as part of a change request management process, can be used

to automate provisioning changes as well as setting up new environments throughout the application

lifecycle — from development, testing and through production.

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Figure 13: Real-time Change Detection

Application Visibility

Composite applications running in the cloud incorporate a range of shared components, such as SOAP

services, packaged applications, EJBs, POJOs, ESBs, databases, physical and virtual servers and so on.

While traditionally most IT operations teams have focused on managing individual components and

tiers (virtual servers, hardware machine, database, servers, application servers, networks, storage farms,

etc.), they have increasingly come to understand that these elements deliver value to the business only

in the context of the applications and business transactions that they support. Business decision makers

also view the applications in terms of their ability to support critical business activity, such as the

volume and response time on product quotes provided, orders executed, and payments processed.

Hence to deliver real value, IT needs to be able to manage, diagnose and resolve application

performance problems and provide the best possible end user experience.

Enterprise Manger provides the following for managing performance of applications running in the

cloud environment:

• End User Monitoring – The ultimate measure of application performance, monitoring the user

experience can provide insights not possible by server and application monitoring alone

• Discovery & Modeling – For IT system dependency mapping, application component dependency

mapping, and transaction modeling

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• Business Transaction Management – for transaction visibility, performance analysis, and exception

management

• Component Diagnostics – for visibility into component performance and resource utilization. To

facilitate root cause analysis and remediation

• APM Database – for a common view across all user, system, application component, and transaction

metric data and dependencies

End User Management

End users rely on enterprise applications running in the cloud to accomplish specific business

activities. Most of these users are not technical, and to them, their application is IT. In fact, in the

case of external end users (if the application is hosted in a SaaS cloud), the application is the company.

A sub-optimal application can negatively impact not only the immediate business activities that the

users try to perform, but also the brand image of an organization, revenue, and ultimately, profit.

Oracle Enterprise Manager monitoring and analytical capabilities allow IT administrators to

continuously collect application usage data to proactively monitor application health from end user

perspective, avoiding the need to rely on end users to tell them that there are application problems. IT

support personnel can better help end users by viewing click-by-click history of what the users did and

the problems that they run into as if they were sitting right next to the users when the problems

happened. Application usage insights can also be used to help make longer term planning decisions,

such as investment on cloud capacity, targeted application tuning efforts, and creating more realistic

test cases that mirror actual production application usage.

Discovery and Modeling

Achieving in-depth insight on end user experience is important, but it is not enough by itself. End user

management can tell IT that something is broken, but in order to fix things and to make longer-term

improvements, IT needs to be able to conquer the complexity between the application components

and understand their relationships. Using the topologies that are built and shown by Oracle Enterprise

Manager, application administrators can answer questions such as:

• What are the components that an application is made up of?

• How are these components related to each other?

• How are they utilized?

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Figure 14: Application Discovery and Modeling

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides extensive discovery and modeling of applications and the

underlying infrastructure components. For service oriented architecture (SOA) based applications,

Oracle Enterprise Manager automatically discovers the entire deployment environment—including

application virtual machines, physical servers and clusters. It then harvests information about these

applications by analyzing the Java byte code and various metadata and log files—looking for design-

time artifacts. Using this information, it maps high-level business processes (BPEL) with low-level

Java EE application components’ relationships, correlating the layers automatically. This intelligent

application blueprint, stored in the drill-down application model, is used during all phases of

performance management—from continuous service-level monitoring to diagnostic root cause

analysis.

Business Transaction Management

Business transactions are often executed by arranging, or "orchestrating," existing applications and

infrastructure in the cloud to implement business processes. They incorporate a wide variety of

technologies, deployed across many platforms and organizational boundaries such as ESBs, Process

Engines, middleware, legacy and packaged applications. Composite applications running in the cloud

incorporate a range of shared components, such as SOAP services, packaged applications, EJBs,

POJOs, ESBs, databases and so on. However, despite the complexity of such processes, they must

behave as single, seamless transactions from the point of view of the business user. .

Oracle Enterprise Manager shows who is consuming the services, and segments these consumers for

SLA-driven quality of service. Its support for detailed usage analysis and reporting over time helps

organizations to identify trends and revenue opportunities. To support business views, Oracle

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Enterprise Manager delivers a rich library of portlets along with sophisticated capabilities for capturing

and visualizing business metrics. Key properties—such as order totals, purchase amounts, purchase

limits, claims types—can aggregated across multiple transactions, monitored, and reported on.

Figure 15: Performance Dashboard for Oracle Business Transaction Management

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides sophisticated instrumentation for real-time detection, alerting, and

remediation of various types of unexpected technical exceptions or business conditions. Using Oracle

Enterprise Manager, application support personnel can quickly search transactions based on message

content and context—such as time of arrival, message type, customer ID, or part number—to locate

the transaction in questions and rapidly nail down the root cause of a problem.

Transparency

Oracle Enterprise Manager gives administrators the ability to monitor their cloud infrastructure

transparently without having to deal with underlying components. They can get availability and

performance information for various software and hardware resources.

Manage Many-as-One

Today's IT operations can be responsible for managing a great number of components, such as

databases, application servers, hosts, or other components, which can be time consuming and

impossible to manage individually. Oracle Enterprise Manager’s group management system lets you

combine components (called targets in Oracle Enterprise Manager) into logical sets, called groups. This

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enables an administrator to organize, manage, and effectively monitor the potentially large number of

targets in the enterprise. Operations available at the group level include:

• View a summary status of the targets within the group.

• Monitor outstanding alerts and policy violations for the group collectively, rather than individually.

• Monitor the overall performance of the group through performance charts.

• Perform administrative tasks, such as scheduling jobs for the entire group, or blacking out the group

for maintenance periods.

In a private cloud environment, the components belonging to a specific cloud Zone can be mapped to a

single Enterprise manager group and managed as a unit.

Figure 16: Manage Many-as-one

Oracle Enterprise Manager also provides a scalable Job System that can be used to execute custom

scripts, OS commands, etc. on multiple targets or all of targets in a group. This automates tedious,

repetitive tasks and saves administrative costs.

Monitoring Templates

Monitoring Templates simplify the task of standardizing monitoring settings across your enterprise by

allowing you to specify the monitoring settings once and applying them to your monitored targets.

Administrators can also use Monitoring Templates as a way to propagate user-defined metrics across a

large number of targets.

Metrics and Chargeback Reports

Oracle Enterprise Manager collects extensive performance metrics for components and systems it

manages. The reporting framework can be used to:

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• Create content-rich, well-formatted HTML reports based on Management Repository metric data

• Generate reports immediately using out-of-box reports without any system configuration or setup

• Schedule automatic generation of reports and store scheduled copies and/or e-mail them to intended

audiences

• Share reports with the entire business community: executives, customers, and other Oracle

Enterprise Manager administrators

Figure 17: Oracle Enterprise Manager Operating System Metrics

The metric data stored in the repository is exposed as database repository views. Integrators can extract

this usage data, aggregate them and associate it with Billing services such as Oracle Billing and

Resource Management and generate chargeback reports. In most IT organizations, chargeback does

not entail actual monetization but simply ensures accountability. Such metering of cloud resources

allows IT to better understand and justify the costs to businesses.

Conclusion

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides single, integrated solution for testing, deploying, operating,

monitoring, diagnosing, and resolving problems in cloud environments. It is Oracle’s flagship product

for datacenter management and offers a simple, scalable solution for managing Oracle stack, from

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applications to disk. In a recently Forrester conducted survey 3, users mentioned that Enterprise

Manager yields a 130% ROI with a payback period of 14 months when deployed for data center

automation, an aspect integral to the Enterprise private cloud.

3 Forrester Consulting: Total Economic Impact of Oracle Enterprise Manager Management Packs http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/infrastructure/em/forrester-tei-em-config-provision.pdf

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Cloud Management using Oracle Enterprise

Manager

April 2010

Author: Madhup Gulati

Contributing Authors: Sudip Datta

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