Monday, March 7, 2016

An Overview of Blue Medora’s “Oracle on VMware” Solutions!


Guest Post By: Kyle Wassink, Blue Medora

More and more of Blue Medora’s customers are choosing to run their Oracle workloads on VMware. This choice comes with spectacular benefits such as server consolidation and licensing savings, as well as new challenges. One of the biggest challenges is effectively monitoring the Oracle workloads in context of the underlying VMware layers. Blue Medora has created solutions to address this specific pain point of virtualization, which helps you keep your Oracle environments running smoothly.

Virtualization challenges and solutions

One of the challenges with virtualization is the inaccuracy of the OS level performance metrics. If you try using Oracle Enterprise Manager’s Host target to monitor your servers after virtualization, you’re looking at inaccurate data. In fact, if you’re relying on any monitoring tool that collects performance information from the operating system (typically with an agent), you are using inaccurate data. You need to get performance metrics from VMware for accuracy.

Another challenge customers face with virtualization is increased Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) when troubleshooting issues. With the additional virtualization layers, multiple tools and teams are now needed to troubleshoot issues effectively.

When you are experiencing issues or an outage with a production Oracle Database or workload, accuracy of data and quick MTTR are vital to recovery. Blue Medora has helped their customers solve these issues with unified “Oracle on VMware” monitoring solutions.

VMware vRealize Operations for Oracle Enterprise Manager

This solution provides a unified view of Oracle running on VMware by collecting data from Oracle Enterprise Manager and pulling it into VMware vRealize Operations. The platform itself collects all the VMware metrics automatically as well as provides advanced customization abilities that are utilized by the Blue Medora Management Pack. Examples include automatic relationships and custom views, reports, dashboards, and capacity planning.

 

This solution excels at giving our customers complete control over how they want to view their Oracle on VMware environment. While over a dozen dashboards are provided out of the box (see an example above and below), customers can also create their own dashboards for specific environments or use cases.

Customization in a unified platform is a huge advantage over multiple monitoring tools because it allows customers to meet once with their vAdmins and Oracle Admins to determine the important use cases and metrics, then create custom dashboards, reports, or views so they are always available. Do the work once and reuse the customizations!

 

If you would like more information or a free trial of the Management Pack for Oracle EM, please visit the product page.

Oracle EM12c Plugin for VMware

This solution is geared toward Oracle admins already using EM12c in their everyday routines. The plugin collects data from the VMware vSphere API and pulls it into Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, automatically creating relationships from the VMware environment to the Oracle targets. With this plugin, our customers take advantage of the deep integration with alerts and new VMware target types to simplify their workflow.

The deep integration with incidents (alerts) in EM12c means that Oracle Admins can create custom monitoring templates and threshold levels on VMware targets without modifying the vSphere environment. For example, one customer had VMware Admins that had a specific list of metrics and threshold values that they cared about for VMware targets. The Oracle Admins, however, wanted to receive alerts at a lower threshold for the Virtual Machines running their production Oracle Databases because they were responsible for uptime and performance SLAs. With the Plugin for VMware installed, the Oracle Admins could setup and receive their VMware-related alerts just like their Oracle ones within EM12c. These VMware incidents even appeared in their Oracle Database dashboards! See below for an example.


A unified view of the Oracle Database > VMware Virtual Machine > VMware Hypervisor relationship has also been a great help to our customers. KPIs are shown for each layer along with links to customized views of each layer. Below is an example of what this looks like.



If you would like more information or a free trial of the Oracle EM12c Plugin for VMware, please visit the product page.


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