2 New Features In Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c

Management Features Now Provided through Plug-ins

The core Enterprise Manager Cloud Control features for managing and monitoring Oracle technologies, such as Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Applications, are now provided through plug-ins that can be downloaded and deployed using the new Self Update feature. In addition to target management, other vertical capabilities such as self-service and chargeback are provided through plug-ins. This new "pluggable" framework enables Enterprise Manager features to be updated without having to wait for the next Enterprise Manager release to provide such functionality. For example, when a new version of Oracle Database is released, you can simply download and deploy the latest Oracle Database Plug-in, which includes management support for the latest release.

Self Update

The Self Update feature enables you to expand Enterprise Manager's capabilities by updating Enterprise Manager components whenever new or updated features become available. Updated plug-ins are made available through the Enterprise Manager Store, an external site that is periodically checked by Enterprise Manager Cloud Control to obtain information about updates ready for download.

Cloud Control also provides support for plug-in and connector management. The ability to update plug-ins is particularly important because core Enterprise Manager features, such as Oracle Database management functionality, is now made available through plug-ins.

Specific updates authored by Oracle that are usually bundled with specific Cloud Control releases can be updated through Self Update. Some examples are Oracle authored Management Plug-ins and Deployment Procedures. In general, Oracle-supplied entities are read-only. You can create a copy and customize the copy according to your needs but you cannot modify the original Oracle-supplied entity.

Software Library

Software Library enhancements for Enterprise Manager 12c are as follows:

• You can now associate multiple files with a single entity.

• You can now move all the revisions of an entity from one folder to another.

• You can now add notes (log information about the changes) and attachments (add/upload files) related to the entity.

• You can now access all of the entities belonging to different functional areas such as bare metal provisioning (BMP), virtualization, and so on from the Software Library console, because the entity management of various functional areas has been integrated into the Software Library console.

• You can now use any of the following storage options that have been newly introduced to store the entities:

  • Referenced File Locations: Referenced file locations enable you to leverage the organization's existing IT infrastructure (such as file servers, Web servers, or storage systems) for sourcing software binaries and scripts. These locations enable entities to refer to files without having to upload them explicitly to the Software Library storage. Referenced file locations support three storage options:

    1. HTTP: An HTTP storage location represents a base URL which acts as the source of files that can be referenced.

    2. NFS: An NFS storage location represents an exported file system directory on a server. The server is not required to be an Enterprise Manager host target.

    3. Agent: An Agent storage location is similar to the Oracle Management Services (Oracle Management Service) Agent File System option, but can be any host monitored by an Enterprise Manager Agent. The Agent can be configured to serve the files located on that host.

  • Management Agent File System:  A Management Agent file system location should be accessible to the management agent running on the host machine where the Oracle Management Service is deployed, and is recommended for multiple Oracle Management Service setup on Windows.

• You can now use the Migrate and Remove feature to migrate all of the entities from one storage location to another, and then delete (remove) the location that does not contain any entity files.

• You can now use the fine grained privileges to control user access to the different entities in the Software Library. Administrators by default do not have any Software Library privileges. It is the responsibility of the super administrator to grant access and privileges to an administrator. The following list describes the Software Library roles and their corresponding fine-grained privileges:

  • EM_PROVISIONING_DESIGNER (Designer): Create and view any Software Library entity

  • EM_PROVISIONING_OPERATOR (Operator): View any Software Library entity

  • EM_PATCH_OPERATOR (Operator): View any Software Library entity

• You can now use Grant and Revoke Privileges to grant users/roles certain privileges on the entities that you own.

• You can now edit, delete, and export entities that you own (user-owned entities). However, you can not edit, delete, or export the entities that are owned by Oracle (Oracle-owned entities)

• You can now use the Create Like option to create a clone of the Oracle-owned entity, and then edit the clone to suit your requirements.

• Enterprise Manager Command Line Interface (EMCLI) Verbs Available in the Software Library

  There are now EMCLI verbs for Software Library that enable you to integrate the creation of generic components with in-house build processes.

  The files generated as part of the build process must be uploaded to the Software Library storage without using the GUI console. The EMCLI verbs supported enable the addition of a storage location, creation of new folders and generic components, upload or referencing of files, update existing generic component entities, and various listing functions.

  Note:

  This feature is new in the 12.1.0.2 release.

• Stage Operation

  There is now an option in the Software Library console to stage files associated with an entity, from Software Library storage to another host target.

  Users can now quickly ascertain whether a newly created entity can be staged to a site, in the process validating the storage location configuration and its associated credentials. Another use case is to extract large software files associated with an entity after it has been uploaded, possibly by other processes or subsystems.

  Note:

  This feature is new in the 12.1.0.2 release.

• You can now view the list of deleted entities from the Software Library Console home page and perform the purge if required. A periodic purge job is also setup which will run daily to clean up the deleted entities.

  Note:

  This feature is new in the 12.1.0.3 release.

• You can now save searches on the Advanced Search page.

  Note:

  This feature is new in the 12.1.0.3 release.

• Plug-in developers can now extend the software library to define out-of-box types and subtypes, entities of these subtypes, and directives. These entities can be consumed in custom job types defined for the plug-in.

  Note:

  This feature is new in the 12.1.0.3 release.

• The requirement to have view privilege on the credential used for configuring Oracle Management Service (OMS) Agent storage location has been removed.

  Note:

  This feature is new in the 12.1.0.3 release.

• New EMCLI verbs to verify and print Software Library usage and to modify a Software Library OMS Agent storage location to change the associated OMS Host and the credential for accessing the location have been added. See the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Administrator's Guide for more information.

  Note:

  This feature is new in the 12.1.0.3 release.

Improved Loader and Redesigned Agent

The loader is the component of the Oracle Management Service that takes data from the agent and then uploads the data into the Enterprise Manager repository. The loader has been redesigned to work synchronously with the agent, eliminating the need to have a temporary file staging area for data uploads. Loader resources are automatically partitioned to enable the more important data (target availability for example) from the more important targets (based on Lifecycle Status) to be processed at higher priority.

The agent has been redesigned and rewritten to be more robust, self-tuning, lightweight and capable of scaling to manage thousands of targets.

Simplified Management of Enterprise Manager Components

Many control operations for the agent are now available in the console. These include start, restart, shut down, secure, resecure, and update of agent properties. These operations can be done on a per agent basis or across many agents at a time, therefore making it easy to manage agents across your data center from a single location. In addition, software problems related to the Oracle Management Service and management agents are automatically detected and raised as problems which can be managed in Incident Manager. In the Incident Manager, you can access the Support Workbench to package the relevant diagnostic information about the problem and open a Support service request (SR) to obtain help from Oracle, thereby reducing time to resolve any Enterprise Manager related problems.

Target Prioritization

Each target now has a lifecycle status target property which can be set to one of the following values: mission critical, production, staging, test, or development. This target property is used to specify the priority by which data from the target should be handled. When Enterprise Manager is under a heavy load, targets where the value of the lifecycle property is mission critical or production are treated with higher priority than targets where the value of the lifecycle property is staging, test, or development. Setting the priorities of your most important targets ensures that even as your data center grows and the number of managed targets grows, your most important targets continue to be treated at high priority.

Simplified OMS Disaster Recovery

OMS Disaster Recovery now uses standard Fusion Middleware procedures for disaster recovery. The new disaster recovery solution requires that all primary OMSes are installed on replicated storage which is automatically kept in sync across primary and standby sites by underlying storage technology. Doing this simplifies the management of the disaster recovery site because standby OMSes are no longer required to be manually updated following operations such as OMS patch applications, plug-in updates, or upgrades.

Dynamic Groups

Dynamic Groups enable the creation of groups based on membership criteria. Membership criteria is based on target properties such as target type, lifecycle status, department, target version, and so on. Targets whose properties match the criteria of a dynamic group are automatically be added to the dynamic group.

Dynamic Groups facilitate easier management of groups. Administrators will only have to define the group membership criteria once and Enterprise Manager automatically adds or removes the targets to or from the appropriate dynamic group.

System Dashboard Enhancements

The System Dashboard enables you to proactively monitor the status and overall health of targets in a group or system. The color coded interface is designed to highlight problem areas and the summary table of open incidents enables you to view and manage these incidents. The System Dashboard has been enhanced to support more frequent refresh intervals (every 30 seconds) and the ability for administrators to stop and resume the refresh of the dashboard. A more frequent refresh interval is critical for data centers that require near real time monitoring of target status and incidents.

Support for BI Publisher 11.1.1.6.0

Enterprise Manager now supports BI Publisher 11.1.1.6.0. As well as being the latest major release, BI Publisher 11.1.1.6.0 includes a number of performance and usability enhancements including Favorites and guided report development for users.

Authentication Enhancements

Support for LDAP authentication and Kerberos strong authentication for Enterprise Manager administrators is now supported. Integration with Oracle Access Manager is also supported. This enables data centers to comply with corporate security standards that they may have in place.

Nonpassword credentials are supported for host and database target authentication. Specifically, SSH key-based authentication is supported for host access and Kerberos tickets are supported for database authentication. Both enable you to take advantage of strong authentication mechanisms for target access.

Improved Credential Management

Credentials are used to control access to managed targets. The use and management of credentials has been improved and simplified. Credentials now have their own life cycle. Administrators can create, update, and delete credentials as separate entities apart from the features that use them. Credentials are also maintained in a centralized credential store. Features that use them refer to these credentials by reference; this means that any change in the credential will automatically be available to all features that use the credentials.

As an Enterprise Manager administrator, you can now create and share Named Credentials with other administrators without disclosing the sensitive content of the credentials. This enables more junior administrators who may not have access to the higher privileged credentials to use these credentials when managing targets. Named Credentials also significantly reduces the number of credentials that need to be created, reducing the time and effort needed to manage the credentials. Finally, the ability to create Named Credentials is protected by an Enterprise Manager privilege therefore enabling data centers to further control management of credentials.

Fine-grained Privileges and Out-of-Box Roles

Enterprise Manager includes more than 200 new granular privileges to control access to targets, objects and other resources, enabling administrators to better segregate their duties. There are also more than 20 new out-of-box roles containing the relevant privileges for different types of Enterprise Manager administrators. For example, consider the provisioning designer and provisioning operator job responsibilities. The former has greater responsibilities (creates components in the Software Library) than the latter (submits deployments). The out-of-box Provisioning Designer and Provisioning Operator roles are correspondingly defined with the appropriate privileges to support their different responsibilities.

Administrator Entitlement Summary Page

The Entitlement summary page provides information about secure resources owned by an administrator as well as roles and privileges that have been granted to that administrator. This summary enables administrators to easily find out if they have sufficient privileges required to perform management tasks using Enterprise Manager.

Auditing

Enterprise Manager continues to increase the set of audited actions. These include: creation and use of named credentials, user login/logout, privilege granting/revoking, monitoring template changes, database start/stop, and so forth. You can now view and search audit data in the Enterprise Manager console. Also, a built-in externalization service is available to purge audit data from the repository and export it to a file system, thereby enabling administrators to control the repository size without loss of audit data. Also, a built-in externalization service is available to purge audit data from the repository and export it to a file system, thereby enabling administrators to control the repository size without loss of audit data. Because infrastructure changes are now audited by default, you should back up audit data.

Better Support for Changing WebLogic Server Demonstration Certificates

The WebLogic Servers that are installed as part of the Enterprise Manager infrastructure are configured, out-of-box, with a demonstration certificate. Oracle recommends that you replace these certificates with production quality certificates for non-development environments to enable more secure communications between components of the Enterprise Manager framework. You can now replace and configure a new certificate using emctl secure WLS.

Search in Administration Group Hierarchy

A new search mechanism is provided to locate a specific group in the administration group hierarchy. Administrators can search for administration groups by name. After the group is found, then administrators can associate template collections with a group, review the management settings associated with the group, and so on.

Support for searches makes it much easier for administrators to setup and review management settings for groups in the administration group hierarchy. This is especially useful in deployments that have large administration group hierarchies where it is difficult to visually locate a group in a hierarchy containing hundreds or thousands of groups.

Flexible Editing of Administration Group Hierarchy

After an administration group hierarchy is defined, administrators may need to change the hierarchy by adding new levels, merging existing groups, or deleting a level. This can now be done easily without having to re-create the entire hierarchy. This flexibility enables administrators to easily adjust their hierarchy to meet changing business needs.

Monitoring Templates and Template Collections Enhancements

You can create a monitoring template by pre-populating the monitoring template with metrics based on a user-selected target type. This is in addition to the option of creating a template based on the metric settings of an existing target. Also, when adding a metric to a monitoring template, this process has been streamlined to enable the user to directly choose specific metrics or metric extensions that are applicable to the target type. These enhancements make it easier for an administrator to create or edit monitoring templates.

You can export and import monitoring templates to share monitoring settings between different Enterprise Manager deployments. The inclusion of Metric Extensions as part of the exported or imported monitoring template provides an easy way to share many Metric Extensions at a time between Enterprise Manager deployments.

Monitoring templates are now self-updatable entities. This means Oracle can provide new monitoring templates for managed targets through the Self-Update mechanism.

Monitoring templates containing Oracle's recommended monitoring settings for targets are now more easily available to customers.

Details of monitoring templates within a template collection can now be easily viewed directly within the Template Collection pages. Also, more information is provided on the management settings associated with an administration group that come as a result of multiple inherited template collections. This feature provides administrators with a more streamlined and easier way to verify and adjust their monitoring setup for the targets in the administration group hierarchy.

Grant Edit or Full Privileges on Metric Extensions

The owner of a metric extension can now grant Edit or Full privileges on the metric extension to another Enterprise Manager administrator or role.

This feature enables the metric extension owner to manage the privileges associated with the metric extension instead of having it managed only by Enterprise Manager super administrators.

Metric Extensions Enhancements

Metric extensions now support additional collection schedule options such as weekly on specified days of the week or monthly on specified days of the month. You can also specify a start time. Administrators have the option of specifying that metrics should be collected for special conditions such as when the target is down, when it is on a standby database, and so forth.

When defining metric columns, there are now options for defining these based on data from other metric columns. Specifically, administrators can define delta metrics (the change in value of the metric over a collection interval), metrics for rates per minute, or rates per five minutes. Rates indicate how much the metric value has changed over the specified time period. These statistical metrics can be used to gauge the throughput or efficiency of a monitored resource. Importing metric extensions has also been improved to enable administrators to retain or change the original metric name and version when importing it into Enterprise Manager. Collectively, these enhancements provide administrators with more flexibility and support for monitoring a broader set of target conditions.

Incident Manager Updates in 12.1.0.2

In Incident Manager, administrators can now perform bulk operations such as Clear and Acknowledge, against many applicable events and incidents at a time.

Incident Manager now displays additional properties about the target for which the incident or event has been raised. Such properties include Lifecycle Status, Cost Center, and so on. Search capabilities have also been expanded to include Lifecycle Status as search criteria. This feature helps provide more operational context about the targets on which the events or incidents were raised. Such operational context is useful in managing the lifecycle of the incident, for example setting the priority and owner of an incident can be based on the target's lifecycle status.

Incident Rules now support criteria based on the lifecycle status of a target. Administrators can now easily create rules for targets of specific lifecycle status values, for example rules for all Production targets and rules for all Development targets. This enhancement helps you to create rules for targets based on lifecycle status without requiring the intermediate step of creating a group that contains such targets.

Incident Manager Updates in 12.1.0.3

Incident Manager has been enhanced to provide better visual correlation of a specific event with related events. These are events on other targets on which the original target depends. Administrators have the option to expand the timeline shown to longer periods of time, enabling them to better assess any patterns of causal relationship between events. Finding possible causes of events helps with the prevention of such events in the future.

Target Down Root Cause Analysis

In application environments, targets are dependent on one another. For example, a J2EE application might be deployed on a WebLogic server cluster consisting of several WebLogic servers and also might have its data stored on a cluster database. In this scenario, if one target goes down, it may cause other dependent targets to go down as well. For target down scenarios, Enterprise Manager automatically analyzes the various target down events and the targets' relationship to each other to determine which events are root cause and which events are symptoms.

Using this correlation analysis, administrators can perform more meaningful actions in Enterprise Manager such as creating incidents or notifying only on root cause events, excluding symptoms from the System Dashboard, deprioritizing incidents with symptom events, and so forth. Providing root cause analysis for target down events enables faster mean-time-to-repair and helps administrators meet service level agreement (SLA) goals.

Oracle Fusion Applications Management Support

You can now manage and monitor all Oracle Fusion Applications targets across the enterprise from a single console, including Fusion instances, product families, and application instances. Unlike other management tools, Cloud Control enables you to manage multiple Fusion Applications components within a WebLogic Server domain. This release also supports scale out of clustered Fusion Products and Fusion Applications.

Support Workbench Enhancements for Oracle Fusion Applications

To enhance troubleshooting Fusion Applications issues, the Enterprise Manager Support Workbench framework now includes incident filtering based on application type and incident consolidation from multiple tiers.

Oracle Fusion Applications Installation Backup and Recovery

You can now perform a full or partial backup and recovery of a Fusion Applications installation. You can back up all components of the Fusion Applications environment, including database and all component file systems, in one procedure. Likewise, you can implement recovery of a full environment or of individual components. This feature replaces the manual Fusion Applications backup and recovery procedure with fully-automated backup and recovery workflows in Cloud Control, based on the System Backup and Recovery framework.

Enterprise Scheduler Service

You can now monitor the performance of Oracle Enterprise Scheduler (ESS) components and jobs.You can also view the status of job requests, including completed job requests by user, application, and work assignment.

Oracle Fusion Applications Management Support

Now, in addition to scaling out a WebLogic Domain, you can scale out (or scale up) the Oracle HTTP Server (OHS). You can perform these scale-out operations in tandem or independently.

Streamlining Whole Server Migration

Whole server migration is the process of migrating a server instance to a different physical machine upon failure. With this release, there is a wizard that enables you to configure a deployment procedure that can trigger whole server migration in the event of host machine failure. The wizard makes it extremely easy and straightforward to plan for and set up whole server migration.

Fusion Applications Backup and Restore Enhancements

Administrators can quickly execute backup and restore operations for Fusion Applications directly from within Oracle Enterprise Manager reducing the overall manual maintenance efforts that can prove error prone and time consuming.

Fusion Application Provisioning Based on T2P

This feature enables administrators to use Oracle Fusion Applications in an automated manner as they move from test to production or between other environments.

Fusion Applications Discovery Diagnostics

The process of discovering a Fusion Applications instance can be challenging for customers. The purpose of this enhancement is to provide diagnostic tools that assist administrators in the event of a Discovery failure. The enhancement provides a number of different validations that assist administrators to identify the root cause or causes of the failure. Examples of the validations include:

• Validating that base agents as well as pre-requisite plug-ins are deployed on targets

• Validating that permissions are correctly set

• Validating jmx connections

• Validating the availability of all relevant servers

New Configuration Standards

There are two new Fusion Applications Configuration Standards in 12.1.0.4: the Fusion Applications Patch Delta Configuration Standard, and the PDIT: FA Configuration Standard.

The Fusion Applications Patch Delta Configuration Standard was designed to enable a comparison of the Fusion Applications patches applied to any Fusion Applications Instance against a pre-defined baseline.

The PDIT: FA Configuration Standard was designed to validate that certain configuration parameters on Fusion Applications targets are in compliance with Oracle's internal best practices. These best practices were defined by the Oracle team responsible for maintaining Oracle's internal Fusion Applications instances.

Administrators can view these standards, as well the associated rules contained in the standards in the Compliance Library.

Discovery of Identity Management, Business Intelligence, Oracle Social Network Domains, and Authorized Oracle HTTP Server Targets Included in Fusion Applications Discovery

Before the 12.1.0.4 plug-in, the discovery process did not include the discovery of extended targets, such as Identity Management or Business Intelligence targets.

With this enhancement, Discovery does include Identity Management, Business Intelligence, Oracle Social Network domains, and authorized OHS targets. This enhancement gives administrators a better, more complete picture of their Fusion Applications instance.

EMCLI for Packaging Fusion Applications Incidents

Before the 12.1.0.4 plug-in, administrators had to use the user interface wizard within Enterprise Manager to package up Fusion Applications incidents.With this feature, administrators can leverage this new EMCLI verb to package up incidents from the command line. This feature will benefit administrators that need to monitor and maintain a large number of Fusion Applications Instances within a single Enterprise Manager instance.

Continued Improvement in Fusion Applications Scale-Out Capabilities

The wizard-driven scale-out capability for Fusion Applications targets has existed since the early releases of the Fusion Application Plug-in. The 12.1.0.4 plug-in includes the following enhancements:

• Improved auto-population of correct values in the Scale-Out wizard, especially in the management of OHS targets

• Support for the scale-out of Fusion Applications instances with SSL ports and certificates

• Improved Scale-Out treatment of different types of Clusters (for example, Fusion Applications and Infrastructure)

Oracle Real Applications Clusters Management Enhancements

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control can be used to monitor and manage Oracle Real Applications Clusters (RAC) One Node databases. RAC One Node has the same rich monitoring capabilities as a regular RAC databases. You can perform Online Database Relocation of RAC One Node using Enterprise Manager. Additionally, fail-over or relocation of RAC One Node database instances is now automatically handled by Enterprise Manager.

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control can be used to manage Quality of Service (QoS) Management functionality provided in Oracle Clusterware release 11.2.0.2 and above. You can create and edit policy sets, review or implement recommendations, and monitor QoS metrics.

Manage Automatic Storage Management Clusters as a Target

You can now monitor and manage clustered Automatic Storage Management (ASM) instances as a single clustered target. This includes discovery, monitoring, configuration, and administration operations at the cluster level. Also, shared storage resource monitoring will be performed from one master agent with a failover mechanism, resulting in higher performance and availability.

Backup and Restore Enhancements

The new Group backup feature in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control provides the ability to backup multiple databases, Oracle homes, and file systems in one operation. Centrally maintained backup configurations can be created, containing uniform database and file backup settings that are applied to all of the objects in a Group backup. A Group backup can include all or a subset of the databases that are members of the group. In addition, in environments where Oracle Secure Backup is used to backup file systems to tape, the respective Oracle homes of each included database can also be included in a Group backup, as well as any other files or directories on hosts that are members of the group. Oracle homes that are backed-up as part of a Group backup can be independently restored to their original location or a new location.

Streams and XStreams Support

Streams and XStreams configurations can now be managed and monitored using Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. In addition to improvements in configuration management and performance monitoring, logical change record (LCR) tracking is available for high-level diagnosis of replication issues. Enterprise Manager Cloud Control also simplifies the management and monitoring of replicated environments.

Schema Change Management Enhancements

The new Change Plans function enables application developers and database administrators to encapsulate multiple required database schema changes into a change plan, which can be used to document, capture, and apply schema changes. Change plans are also integrated with developer DBA tasks into SQL*Developer and Oracle Enterprise Manager task automation. This integration reduces the manual processes between the various stakeholders involved in the process of promoting planned changes across enterprise databases while ensuring the integrity of the process.

Active Session History Analytics

Active Session History (ASH) Analytics enables a performance specialist to explore the different performance attributes of a database session at any point in time. With the ability to create filters on various dimensions, the DBA can not only identify performance issues but also obtain a good understanding of various performance patterns, workload behavior, and system resource usage.

Emergency Monitoring

The Emergency Monitoring feature enables the database administrator to connect to an unresponsive database through a special proprietary mechanism and diagnose performance issues when normal mode connection is not possible. It has an in-built hang analysis capability that enables you to identify blocking sessions and kill these blockers with a click of a button.

Real-time Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor

ADDM is an innovative way to analyze problems in extremely slow or hung databases, which would have traditionally required a database restart. Real-Time ADDM can help resolve issues such as deadlocks, hangs, shared pool contentions, and many other exception situations without resorting to a restart of the database. Real-Time ADDM uses two types of connection modes to connect to the target instance. The normal JDBC connection is intended to perform extensive performance analysis when some connectivity is available. The diagnostic mode which makes a latch-less connection is useful for extreme hang situations when normal connection is not possible.

Compare Period ADDM

Compare Period ADDM enables the administrator to answer the age-old question: Why is performance slower today compared to yesterday? The administrator can compare performance across any two periods of time and determine the root cause of why performance in one period was different than in the other. In addition to pinpointing the root cause for the difference in performance, Compare Period ADDM also indicates whether the two periods are comparable, for example do they have similar SQL workloads running in the same period, by the use of the SQL Commonality index for the two periods.

New Active Reports

Three new Active Reports have been added in this release: ASH Analytics, Real-Time ADDM, and Compare Period ADDM. These are interactive reports that can be used for offline analysis. These reports offer the same level of interactivity as the actual Enterprise Manager screens, with drill-downs to detail views. These Active Reports can be emailed to anyone for offline analysis without giving the recipient direct access to Enterprise Manager.

Application Data Model

The Application Data Model (ADM) maintains the table definitions associated with an application, the referential relationships connecting those tables, sensitive data elements, and the associated columns contained in the application Instead of having to manually discover sensitive data, the application data model can programmatically identify and store the sensitive data elements through sensitive data scanning and import of data masking templates.

Data Subsetting

Data subsetting provides the ability to create a smaller sized copy of the original production data that can be given to developers for testing. While it is a data subset, the referential relationships are preserved so that the data set is complete. This enables enterprises to lower storage costs while making production data available to developers for testing, without having to incur the storage footprint of the entire production database.

Reversible Data Masking

You can use reversible masking, which relies on encryption and decryption algorithms, to enable user data encryption deterministically, as a regular expression in a format that you choose. Unmasking reverses the process and reverts back to the original data. This feature is useful in environments where sensitive data must be masked and sent to a third party for processing.

Real Application Testing and Data Masking Integration

Real Application Testing and Data Masking integration provides users with the ability to perform secure testing without compromising data security and compliance regulations. You can now use the SQL Performance Analyzer and Database Replay features against databases where sensitive information has been masked.

Application Templates for Data Masking and Data Subsetting

Enterprise applications are highly complex involving hundreds of tables and thousands of referential relationships. These tables also contain sensitive or private data that cannot be shared with developers or testers. Enterprise Manager now provides predefined data masking and data subsetting templates for different applications. Data masking templates contain the list of columns, sensitive data, and their associated masking formats. Data subsetting templates identify the tables involved in the subsetting process, their referential relationships and associated WHERE clause to extract the subset of the data. These templates enable you to automatically create test systems based on best practice recommendations from the Oracle Applications teams. These templates enable customers to easily create test systems with a subset of the data that is relationally intact and with sensitive information de-identified.

Segregation of Duties

Enterprise Manager now supports the separation of roles specifically for provisioning into Designer and Operator. The Designer role corresponds to administrators who define provisioning standards. The Operator role typically corresponds to administrators who do actual software provisioning. Operators can be less experienced administrators.

Provisioning Profiles

A provisioning profile is a read-only snapshot of an existing database environment that can be used as a starting point to provision a new database. The snapshot can capture the Grid infrastructure (Clusterware and Automatic Storage Management), homes, database homes, and Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) templates. This can all be stored in the Software Library for later use.

Input Lockdown

The locking down feature in Database Provisioning enables Designers to lock down the set of variables, such as host targets, credentials, Oracle homes to be provisioned, and others, in the deployment procedure wizard. This enforces standardized deployments and minimizes errors in configurations during mass deployment. The operator can then deploy the procedure that the designer configures and saves in the Procedure Library.

Provisioning Bundle Updates through the Self Update Feature

You can now access provisioning bundles directly through the Self Update feature, greatly simplifying the process of updating deployment procedures, Software Library entities, and other provisioning artifacts.

Default Variable Values in Deployment Procedures

Deployment Procedure interviews, the user-friendly wizards that guide you through the provisioning activity, now support saving of default variable values for use by other users.

Customizable User-Defined Deployment Procedures

User-Defined Deployment Procedures (UDDP) enable automation of custom, and often complex, processes (for example, third-party application provisioning, JRE upgrade, and so forth).

Software Library Entities

You can now assign privileges to Software Library entities, enabling the enterprise to implement segregation of duties and thus help in complying with corporate security policies. There is a single console for all Software Library entities. This reduces the time spent searching for entities while providing more meaningful ways to display information. This release also includes support for different storage types, such as agent file system, NFS, and HTTP.

Improved Troubleshooting for Deployment Procedures

Deployment Procedures are integrated with the Incident Framework, where incidents are automatically created for critical failures. An incident triggers dump scripts to collect debug information, which can then be packaged in an archive and sent to Oracle Support for analysis. Deployment Procedures also support execution in debug mode, which can be used for additional logging information.

Synchronizing the Software Library

You can now synchronize manually downloaded Cluster Verification Utility (CVU) binaries with the Software Library. Enterprise Manager, by default, provides a routine job that is scheduled daily to download binaries from My Oracle Support, if corresponding binaries in the Software Library need to be updated. If your Enterprise Manager deployment is behind a firewall or a DMZ such that the HTTP connection to My Oracle Support is disabled, the routine job will skip its execution. In this case, you can manually download the CVU binaries corresponding to your platform from OTN or My Oracle Support using patch 9288873 as the source. Subsequently, you can use the Cluster Verification Utility to ensure that the latest CVU binaries are present in the Software Library.

Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System Support

Enterprise Manager now supports Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System Support (ACFS) Security and Encryption features. ACFS encryption enables users to store data on disk in an encrypted format. Enterprise Manager users who are ACFS administrators are now able to use these features to implement and manage security on file system objects stored in ACFS.

Support for Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1)

Database Plug-in 12.1.0.3 provides complete management and monitoring support for Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1) targets, including the following:

• Support for creating and managing pluggable databases (PDBs)

• Backup and recovery

• Performance management

• Real-time database operations monitoring

• Enhancements to real-time Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM) storage

• Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System Support (ACFS) and Automatic Storage Management (ASM) management support

• Database security, including data redaction and database auditing

• Database testing, including consolidated replay, data subsetting, and data masking features

Support for Pluggable Databases and Container Databases

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control enables administrators to manage the complete lifecycle of a pluggable database (PDB) including provisioning container databases (CDBs), and PDBs (from seed or unplugged PDBs), cloning existing PDBs, migrating non-CDBs to PDBs, patching (single instance and RAC) and upgrading. In addition, features such as configuration management, compliance management, change management, and auto discovery have been updated to support both CDBs and PDBs.

Support for Container Database Backup and Recovery

Enterprise Manager now supports CDB backup and recovery through the new PDB syntax. Users can backup and recover an entire CDB, individual PDBs, or the tablespace or datafile of specific PDBs.

Users familiar with Enterprise Manager-managed backup and recovery tasks can leverage the same skill set for CDB backup and recovery tasks.

New Pluggable Database Target Type to Support Container Based Databases in Oracle Database 12c

Enterprise Manager now provides built-in support for performance management, storage management, user and security management, and so on to effectively manage and monitor PDBs from a single console. This makes the administration of PDBs easy by enabling an administrator to switch between containers on all PDB target pages. The CDB level pages that are accessible only at the root container by the CDBA enable administrators to manage and monitor the entire database as a single unit.

Enhancements to Expose Navigation Between Containers in a Container Database

Enterprise Manager enables an authorized administrator to seamlessly navigate between different containers in a CDB. The administrator can use the container picker at the top of the page to move between PDBs in pages (for example storage administration, user management) that display PDB specific information.

Support for Oracle ASM Features

Enterprise Manager now supports Oracle Flex ASM, disk resync improvements, Oracle ASM rebalance improvements, the ability to enable access control for Oracle ASM files on Windows, Oracle ASM corrupt media recovery (scrubbing), and Oracle ASM filter driver. Users benefit from the easy-to-use interface used to monitor and manage tasks such as job scheduling, metrics collection, and so on.

Support for Oracle ACFS New Features

Enterprise Manager support for Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System (Oracle ACFS) features includes Oracle ACFS enhancements for Grid homes, Oracle Flex ASM for Oracle ACFS and Oracle ADVM (ASM Dynamic Volume Manager), Oracle ACFS tagging, and Oracle ACFS snapshot enhancements. This support enables all Oracle ACFS file system functionality to be managed by an easy-to-use graphical management interface.

Enterprise Manager also now supports ACFS security and encryption. This new support provides security management solutions to customers who use Enterprise Manager to manage Oracle ACFS.

Database Replay Support for Database Consolidation Using Pluggable Databases

Database Replay supports concurrent execution of multiple database replays on a single target database to test and verify database consolidation. The database captures can come from a traditional database or from an Oracle PDB, captured at the container or at the PDB level. When replaying workloads against a PDB, the replays can be targeted to specific PDBs through connection remapping.

Database Replay support for consolidated replays enables the investigation of the interaction of multiple production scale workloads consolidated to a single database. It also eliminates risk and unanticipated problems for database consolidation projects.

Data Masking Support

The following enhancements have been made to data masking and data subsetting functionality.

Real-Time Database Operations Monitoring

SQL monitoring introduced in Oracle Database 11g enables DBAs and developers to monitor individual executions of SQL scripts. Real-time database operations monitoring extends SQL monitoring to include long running database application operations such as batch jobs, scheduler jobs, and extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) jobs. Using similar capabilities to real time SQL monitoring, database operations monitoring provides a database-server based tracking mechanism that enables users to identify database operations and then monitor progress and alerts, tune associated SQL queries, and compare performance.

Database administrators can easily associate SQL queries or scripts with long running database operations and get a holistic view of the progress instead of having to track individual SQL scripts thereby saving valuable time in troubleshooting complex database operations.

Monitoring and Diagnostics Features

Business Application Target Features

The Business Application (BA) Target is a monitored functional application. The BA Target monitors different views and layers of the application stack. It combines the user's perspective (through Real User Experience Insight), transaction visibility between application components (through Business Transaction Management (BTM)), application component monitoring (including Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Application and Dependency Performance (ADP)), and system monitoring.

The BA Target provides a consolidated overview that enables BA owners to see and understand the health of their applications. The BA target pages enables you to see all aspects of the BA health. They also provide problem triage capabilities and a starting point to drill down to more detailed system and application component related views.

The following pages are an integral part of the BA Target:

• Business Application List Page

  This page provides a list of all BA Targets for which you have at least read permission, including significant status indicators. You can use it to navigate to a specific BA dashboard. This page enables you to see at a glance which BAs require attention.

• Business Application Home Page

  This is the home page for the BA target. The dashboard can display Oracle Real User Experience Insight (RUEI), BTM, and System regions containing data associated with the BA. In addition, an event status region shows the rollup of all events and incidents for RUEI key performance indicators (KPIs), BTM transactions, system metric violations, and SLAs. The status region also presents the System status and the BA target status. The default configuration includes the following regions:

  • RUEI KPIs

  • BTM Transaction List

  • System Status

  • Incidents

  • Service Test Status

  This dashboard enables you to view all aspects of the BA health. It also provides problem triage capabilities and a starting point to drill down to more detailed system related views (including JVMD, composite application, and WLS monitoring home page,).

• Business Transaction Drill-Down Page

  The Business Transaction region on the Business Application Home page displays the transactions mapped by the administrator of the BA, one transaction for each row. Click a transaction link to view the dedicated business transaction page.This page contains the following regions and features:

  • Transaction Summary

  • Business Transaction Aggregate Flow

  • Operations

  In the topology view of the transaction's aggregate flow, you can click individual nodes to further connect to additional performance management functionality. Right-clicking on a node gives you the option to view the matching servers in JVM Diagnostics or to open the selected operation in the BTM native user interface.

  Note:

  Note that the link to JVM Diagnostics will only result in a valid page if JVM Diagnostics is deployed in the servers where the selected operation is located.

• Real User Experience Insight Session Diagnostics Page

  With this feature it is possible to correlate the Request Instance trace that is reported in Request Instance Diagnostics to a user session reported in RUEI Session Diagnostics. It also provides a contextual drill-down to review the request within the complete user session.This feature is created from the following pages:

  • Session Search

  • Session Diagnostics

  The Session Search page enables you to specify what set of sessions to review. Selections can be made by time and with a combination of filters such as browser type, end user country, filters for selecting specific functional areas of the application, and so on.

  The search affects the number of sessions displayed at the bottom of the page. For each session some overview data is presented including user name, user origin, statistical overview of performance, experienced errors during the session, and so on.

  By clicking any of the session links displayed in the table, you are routed to the second page in this feature which displays the entire user session, including all individual clicks the users performed the session.

Lifecycle Management Features

Oracle Site Guard Features

This section provides an overview of the new features available in Oracle Site Guard 12c Release 1 (12.1.0.3) plug-in releases.

User Interface for Site Guard Configuration

In 12c Release 1 (12.1.0.3), you can use the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Console user interface to perform the following task:

• Creating Oracle Site Guard Configuration

• Associating Credentials for Site

• Associating Pre-Scripts and Post-Scripts

• Associating Storage Scripts

For more information, see "Setting Up Oracle Site Guard" in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Lifecycle Management Administrator's Guide.

Preferred credentials Support

In this release, you can use preferred credentials to run an operation plan.

Preferred credentials are used to simplify access to managed targets by storing target login credentials in the Management Repository. With preferred credentials set, users can access an Enterprise Manager target that recognizes those credentials without being prompted to log in to the target. Preferred credentials are set on a per user basis, thus ensuring the security of the managed enterprise environment.

• Default Credentials: Default credentials can be set for a particular target type and will be available for all the targets of the target type. It will be overridden by target preferred credentials.

• Target Credentials: Target credentials are preferred credentials set for a particular target. They could be used by applications such as the job system, notifications, or patching. For example, if the user chooses to use preferred credentials while submitting a job, then the preferred credentials set for the target (target credentials) will be used. If the target credentials are not present, the default credentials (for the target type) will be used. If the default credentials are not present, the job will fail. If not specified, by default, preferred credentials refer to preferred target credentials.

For more information on setting up preferred credentials, see "Setting Preferred Credential Using EMCLI Commands" in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Lifecycle Management Administrator's Guide.

Re-order Execution Order

For more information, see "Changing Execution Orders" in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Lifecycle Management Administrator's Guide.

Identity Management Features

Other Features

Middleware as a Service Features

Oracle Exalogic Management Enhancements

This release provides the following Exalogic dashboard enhancements:

• Integrated hardware and software schematics

• Hardware-software topology views

• Hardware targets monitoring (Compute, ZFA appliance, Infiniband Fabric, ILOM)

• OTD monitoring

• Support for virtual and non-virtual configurations

• Monitoring of Exalogic vServer guest virtual machines (VMs)

• Health checks

• Trusted partition/Virtual Central Processing Unit (vCPU) licensing report

SOA Management Features

Enhancements to SOA Fault Management

SOA administrators can now perform comprehensive fault management directly from Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, including search and single and bulk fault recovery. This new feature replaces all of the previous faults and reject messages tabs and regions at the composite level with the top-level search and resubmit.

RAC support for SOA Dehydration Monitoring

SOA Dehydration store monitoring in Enterprise Manager Cloud Control now supports RAC databases.

Monitoring and Diagnostics Features

Exalytics Management

With the introduction of the Exalytics target, Exalytics management is now consistent with other engineered systems. Both virtual and physical deployments will be supported for this target. The feature includes guided discovery, a personalizable software dashboard, routing topology, and vCPU usage reporting.

These features align Exalytics management with the Engineered Systems Management story and show a tighter integration between Exalytics and Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. The new features improve the user's management experience and productivity. The vCPU reporting supports the reporting and auditing requirement for virtualized environments using vCPU licensing.

JVMD/ADP Installation and Upgrade

You can now automate the deletion of JVMD/ADP engines and agents. This feature is available from the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control user interface. Previously deletion or undeployment required manual steps.

Updates to the Middleware Summary Page

The Middleware Summary page (accessible by selecting Middleware from the Targets menu) has traditionally displayed a table with the status and health of middleware software managed by Enterprise Manager Cloud Control.

Beginning with this release, administrators can now choose to display a graphical view of the same data. This graphical view is similar to a heat map where targets are represented as boxes and the size and color of each box depicts a potential problem areas. Such a view enables administrators to quickly analyze a large amount of data, customize filtering, and pinpoint problems more efficiently.

The Middleware Summary page also provides predefined searches that filter the target types shown in both of the table as well as graph views. The searches available are based on what middleware targets have been discovered by Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. The most recent search selected is saved as the default search to display when returning to the Middleware Summary page. Saved searches enable administrators to find what they are looking for faster.

Monitor Oracle Jolt Performance Metrics

Administrators can now monitor Oracle Jolt performance metrics including maximum capacity, pending requests, pool state, request errors (per minute), and requests (per minute). Such metrics are available from the WebLogic Server target when Oracle Tuxedo and WebLogic are configured to use Oracle Jolt.

WebLogic Cluster Performance Summary Page Supported for Non-Oracle JRF Enabled Clusters

The WebLogic Cluster Performance Summary page no longer requires you to enable Oracle Java Required Files (JRF) on the cluster. Performance metric data appears on the summary page regardless of whether or not the cluster is Oracle JRF enabled.

Oracle Exalogic Management Enhancements

The following new features related to Exalogic Management help provide enhanced operational visibility:

• Control Stack monitoring for virtualized Exalogic systems enables administrators to view the status of the software infrastructure.

• It is now possible to send Enterprise Manager Ops Center hardware alarms and alerts to Enterprise Manager Cloud Control's incident management system and manage hardware and software incidents from a single pane of glass.

• Exacheck target now appears in the Exalogic Navigation Tree providing in-context navigation to Exacheck results.

• Additional performance and filtering optimizations has been made to the Exalogic Software Dashboard.

• Exalogic BI Publisher Reporting has been enhanced.

Diagnostic Snapshot Enhancements

Administrators have traditionally been able to create a diagnostic snapshot from the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control console whenever a middleware-related issue occurs, and then analyze the diagnostic snapshot in offline mode either from the same Enterprise Manager Cloud Control instance that generated the snapshot or from a completely different Enterprise Manager Cloud Control instance (for example, when the snapshot is sent to Oracle Support for analysis). This release includes the following enhancements to the Diagnostic Snapshot feature:

• Archived logs for WebLogic Server and JVM targets can be included in a new diagnostic snapshot.

• You can create a diagnostic snapshot through the EMCLI.

• You can include diagnostic snapshots in a Support Workbench incident.

These additional Diagnostic Snapshot capabilities reduce the resolution time of external bugs related to Fusion Middleware software.

Archived Log Files Supported in Log Viewer

Administrators can now use Log Viewer to view and correlate messages across archived log files for Fusion Middleware components. In the past, Log Viewer supported viewing and correlating messages from active log files only. Including archived log files in Log Viewer helps administrators to diagnose and resolve performance problems that may have occurred in the past.

Lifecycle Management Features

Administration Features

User Interface Updates for Site Guard Operations

You can use the new Site Guard user interface to create, execute, and monitor operation plans for switchover, failover, start, and stop.

RUEI Metric Page

The RUEI Metric page uses the same search mechanism as the Session Diagnostics page but here the result set is displayed in the Metric Correlation Chart where RUEI metrics can be compared against all other system metrics and be displayed in time. This means that End User Page Load times can be presented in time compared with Java active threads or system CPU usage to discover possible connections. Any view can be stored in the correlation chart. This page can also be directly opened from any RUEI event from the Events and Incidents console. All RUEI events have a link to the metrics page and when selected, the Metric page opens in context of the right metric filters and time period immediately.

JVM Real-Time Thread State

This regions displays a list of all of the JVMs that are associate with the Business Application. It provides a per JVM view of real-time status based on the JVM thread activities. You are presented with thread counts of specific activities and states including DB Wait, IO Wait, Runnable, and Idle. The number of threads counted in a specific state reflects how much work a JVM is performing on that area. For example, a larger than normal thread count in DB Wait state suggests a slower than normal DB response time. The region also provides direct access to the JVM Diagnostic pages for more detailed investigation. This region is updated with real-time data every 30 seconds.

JVM Active Threads

This region provides an overtime view of the data presented by the JVM real-time Thread State region. The data is summarized across all of the JVM and presented for the last 24 hours.

Enhancements to the RUEI Data page

The RUEI Data page has been enhanced with a new region displaying the health of all user flow that are related to the Business Application. It shows the number of completes, completion rate, the error percentage, and what step of the user flow caused most dropped sessions from the user flow in a single table overview.

Enhancements to the RUEI Session Diagnostics

On the Session Diagnostics page, you can open the replay for the reported page with the Session report and display the source details of the screen view and an actual screen replay of the page as the user experienced it. ADF based pages, Siebel HI, and Oracle Forms display only source details.

Application Replay Enhancements

After a successful replay, users were able to view reports to analyze, capture, and replay results. The reporting mainly focused on application page names and addressed questions such as what was the performance of the page and which pages diverged compared to capture.

Now users have the ability to not only look at page level diagnostics but also session level diagnostics. With this new ability, you can answer questions such as which sessions showed poor performance and then quickly identify the pages where the session was experiencing poor performance.

Additionally, to ensure that a page's poor performance is not caused by setup issues, a divergence report showing differences between the capture and replay of pages is provided. Similarly, when ensuring that a session's performance is not due to a divergence between capture and replay, users were required to view the raw HTTP requests and response contents manually and compare the difference. Now users can simply export a packaged zip file containing capture and replay content and diagnostics and import that into Oracle Application Testing Suite's OpenScript. Doing this enables an automated and visual comparison of capture and replay of a specific session, drastically reducing the time to identify any divergence or potential performance issues.

These diagnostics improvements enable deeper analysis of replay results quickly and reduce the time to isolate potential issues in a replay environment with perspective of end user sessions.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine Management Enhancements

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control now provides support for full lifecycle management of Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Key features include:

• Automatic discovery of all Exadata hardware and software components

• Automatic creation of Enterprise Manager system for end-to-end monitoring of the entire Oracle Exadata Database Machine

• Extensive administration capabilities for databases, Exadata cells, and Infiniband switches

• Rich performance diagnostics with the help of in-depth performance charts covering all hardware and software Exadata components

Exadata Database Machine Support for SuperClusters

The Exadata plug-in has been enhanced to support the discovery, monitoring, and complete management of the Exadata Database Machine in a SuperCluster engineered system. These enhancements includes support for logical domains (LDOMs) (control, IO, and guest) and zones (global and non-global) created within a SuperCluster. They enable customers to manage and monitor all of their Oracle engineered systems from a single Oracle Enterprise Manager console.

Enhanced I/O Resource Management in Oracle Exadata Database Machines

In this plug-in release along with the existing percentage based plan definition, the I/O resource management (IORM) enhancement enables you to define share based disk I/O plans. Share-based plans use a relative share instead of percentage allocations and levels. These plans are simpler to implement, but as effective as percentage allocations. For example, if a critical database called FINANCE has four shares, and a low-priority database called REPORTING has one share, then the FINANCE database is four times more likely to issue I/Os compared to the REPORTING database.

Oracle Exadata Database Machines Management

Many users have created their own multi-rack setup with two or more Exadata systems or they have added more storage to their existing Exadata systems using the Exadata Storage Expansion Rack. Starting with the 12.1.0.4 release of the Exadata plug-in, you can discover, manage, and monitor multiple Exadata machines as a single entity as long as they are part of the same database cluster. This support is applicable to all existing Exadata versions, for example V2, X2, and X3.

The multi-rack and storage expansion rack support enables administrators to manage and monitor multiple engineered systems from a central place. This will improve the administrator's ability to detect and diagnose hardware and software faults in a multi-rack setup.

System Support

With this feature, partner SDK enables Metadata Plug-ins to define composite target types or systems which contain multiple member target types that are related to each other. This relationship between target types can be defined through associations which are displayed as part of the system topology.

Custom Discovery Support

This feature enables guided discovery of systems and composite targets that include multiple members which enables discovery and promotion of members in bulk instead of manual discovery of each member.

Localization Support

This feature will enable Metadata Plug-ins to include resource bundle properties files to support translated strings that can be used across different features in Enterprise Manager exposed through the partner SDK. This will allow partners and customers to create Metadata Plug-ins that are linguistically and culturally appropriate for a target country or region.

Support for SQL Server 2012 (32-bit / 64-bit)

This plug-in now supports SQL Server 2012 (32-bit / 64-bit) target types, and no longer provides support for SQL Server 2000 (32-bit).

Scaling Up and Scaling Down Tier Targets

You can scale up and scale down a tier within an assembly deployment. The scalability of a tier depends on how it is defined in the assembly. Scaling up enables you to create multiple servers; there are minimum and maximum limits. The scaling down feature also enables you to shut down servers in a tier.

Purging Deployment Requests

You can now purge deployment requests after a specified period of time by enabling the Request Archiving Policy.

Notification for Request Statuses

Self service users can now receive e-mail notification when their resource requests succeed or fail.

RESTful Web Services Support

This release includes RESTful Web Services-based API support for Database as a Service (DBaaS.) The previous release already provided API support for IaaS.

Schema as a Service

This new capability provides the highest level of consolidation by hosting multiple schemas in a single database. Using Enterprise Manager 12c, Cloud users can request for one or more schemas, with seed data, from the out-of-the-box self service portal. Metering and chargeback capabilities provide visibility into resource consumption and expense incurred.

Database Cloning Using Snap Clone

Snap Clone is a new capability in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control12c that provides instant database cloning.It enables administrators to provision copies of production systems very quickly into test environments. This is done using the built-in copy-on-write (CoW) capabilities of the underlying storage layer. Cloud users can request these databases and have them provisioned within minutes instead of hours all while keeping the storage needs to a minimum. The self-service provisioning capabilities save operational costs while helping DBAs to become more productive by removing the burdens of manual cloning tasks.

Database Cloning using RMAN Backup

RMAN has been the tool of choice for backing up and restoring databases for many years. Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c provides ability to clone databases using RMAN backups through the self service portal. This enables Cloud users who have not invested in storage cloning technologies to create full clones of databases within a few clicks.

Testing Cloud Self Service Portal

The Testing Cloud Self Service Portal, also known as Testing as a Service (TaaS), is a cloud-based platform for delivering automated application testing services. It is a self-service solution designed for private clouds. TaaS orchestrates the testing process end-to-end by automating the provisioning of test labs. This includes application under test and test tools, executing load and functional test scripts against the application, and providing rich application monitoring and diagnostics data for analysis. In addition, TaaS has a sophisticated charge back facility for metering and charging the usage of the testing cloud by end-users.

TaaS provides:

• A secure test library with access control for any assets consumed, for example Test Assets or Environment

• Automation and orchestration around provisioning of Test Drivers (test tools used together with TaaS)

• Test Drivers

• Rich monitoring and diagnostics

• Reporting capabilities

• Charge back and metering of resource usage during testing

Infrastructure as a Service

IaaS includes the following enhancements:

• Import Virtual Machine enables you to directly import a template as a virtual machine.

• The storage features now support non-uniform NFS exports and iSCSI multipath.

• Network Time Protocol (NTP) can be configured for virtual servers for time synchronization.

Database as a Service

DBaaS includes the following enhancements:

• RESTful APIs for Schema as a Service, Snap Clone, and RMAN based cloning

• RESTful and EMCLI verbs for setup tasks related to PaaS Infrastructure Zone, Software Pool, and Provisioning Profile

• New Snap Clone Analyzer dashboard that shows storage utilization and savings

• Enhanced home pages and tree navigation for PaaS Infrastructure Zone and Software Pool

• Snap Clone support for NetApp ONTAP version 8.x (7 mode)

Chargeback Enhancements

The setup and management for Chargeback has been significantly improved with new pages for charge plan setup and target configuration. Extensibility for existing chargeback targets is also provided by allowing custom metrics, including metric extensions, to be registered as charge items. This is done by using the new EMCLI commands such as EMCLI list_charge_item_candidates and EMCLI create_charge_item. This feature increases the flexibility that Chargeback administrators have when creating charge plans, enabling them to supplement the out-of-the-box metrics with metrics matched to their own specific requirements. New published repository views provide access to metering and charge data. These views can be used for reporting or for the integration of Chargeback with other applications.

Support for Oracle Pluggable Databases is also provided with this release. This enables the Chargeback administrator to add a Container Database (CDB) to Chargeback and assign each Pluggable Database (PDB) individually to a cost center.

Consolidation Planner Support for Exalogic

Customers can now consolidate from physical servers to Exalogic environments. To evaluate different consolidation scenarios, customers are now able to choose from several preconfigured scenarios (Conservative, Medium, and Aggressive) or create their own custom scenarios. These preconfigured and custom scenarios support both real and phantom Exalogic targets. This enables customers to consolidate middleware and cloud workloads onto the platform ideal for those workloads. The SPECjbb benchmark metric has been added to SPECint to provide this support.

Improved Support for Middleware Consolidation

Consolidation Planner now supports SPECjbb benchmark metrics as a basis for evaluation when consolidating onto Exalogic or other middleware environments. Previously only SPECint was supported, which measures only CPU performance, whereas SPECjbb measures overall system performance. Users can now evaluate system resources required for consolidating middleware and Java-based workloads by using a system-based benchmark metric designed to measure such workloads.

Improved Support for Virtual Machine Consolidation

The option to treat memory as a nonsharable resource has been added because multiple virtual machines (VMs) cannot share each other's memory spaces. Additionally, you can now specify a reserved amount of memory on target hosts for the hypervisor's requirement, memory which will not be allocated to VMs. You can also scale memory up or down on the target servers and display the suggested allocation for each virtual machine on the target server. These enhancements support more accurate and improved consolidation assessments by evaluating more realistic memory allocation schemes.

Patching the Oracle Virtual Machine Server

Oracle provides a publicly available YUM repository that includes repositories for Oracle Virtual Machine. These repositories include the full releases of Oracle Virtual Machine and mirror those releases on the Oracle Virtual Machine DVDs/ISOs. The Oracle Virtual Machine Server must be patched to ensure that the latest software updates and enhancements are applied. Patching the Oracle Virtual Machine Server involves the following:

• Configuring the YUM repository

• Upgrading the Virtual Server

You perform both of these tasks in Cloud Control. From the Enterprise menu select Infrastructure Cloud, then select Home. See The Cloud Administration Guide for detailed instructions.

Acknowledging Oracle Virtual Machine Events

All operations performed on a server, server pool, storage, or network generate Oracle Virtual Machine events. The event can be informational, minor, or critical. A target in an error state generates a critical event. Targets with a Critical status cannot be used to perform any operations. The cloud administrator can now acknowledge Oracle Virtual Machine events through a menu selection.

Support for Oracle Virtual Machine 3.1.1 Management

The virtualization management functionality in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c is now enhanced to include features from the latest Oracle Virtual Machine 3.1.1 release. The key enhancements include:

• Automatic refresh of the (Oracle Cluster File System 2 (OCFS2) repository size

• Automatic resize of OCFS2 as part of a LUN (repository/server pool) resize

• Backup/restore of OCFS2 repositories

• Cold migration of VMs

• Multipath boot support for Oracle SAN (Storage Area Network)

• Support for hot vCPUs

• Ability to add and remove OCFS2 repository from a cluster

Support for Oracle Virtual Machine 3.2.2 Management

This update of the Virtualization Management Plug-in provides support for managing Oracle Virtual Machine 3.2.2 environments.

Virtual Server Roles

The I/O operations performed by virtual servers are resource intensive and can reduce application performance. To avoid this, you can now edit the virtual server and designate some servers to perform utility functions by assigning the following roles:

• Utility Role: Servers with this role are used for non-virtual machine operations such as clone, import template, create repository, and delete assembly.

• Virtual Machine Role: Servers with this role are required to run VMs and perform start and stop operations.

Virtual Server Pool Enhancements

Managing Multiple Virtual Servers

You can now upgrade, start, and stop multiple servers by selecting them on the Virtual Server Pool Members page.

Storage Repository

You can now periodically refresh and update the file system size of all storage repositories.

Cluster Timeout Period

During virtual server pool creation, if you enable clustering of Oracle Virtual Machine servers in a virtual server pool, you can specify the cluster timeout period.

If Activate Cluster is enabled, you can set the cluster timeout period in seconds. The disk heartbeat and network heartbeat are derived from the cluster timeout value.

Virtual Machine Administration

You can specify one or more tags for the virtual machine. These tags are used to logically group the VMs and can be used to search for one or more VMs that meet a certain criteria.

Virtual Machine Tagging

Virtual machine tagging is now available. These tags are used to group the virtual machines logically and can be used to search for one or more virtual machines that meet a certain criteria. To apply virtual machine tagging, specify one or more comma separated tags.

Support for Oracle Virtual Machine 3.2.1 Integration

The following new features are available in Oracle Virtualization (VT) Plug-in 12.1.0.5:

• Ability to import guest virtual machines

• Support for non uniform NFS exports

• Multi-access host for iSCSI storage server – support iSCSI multi-path

• Storage repository events

• Ability to change the server pool for a storage repository

• NTP configuration for servers

• Bond port with more than two network interface controllers

• Maximum object cache size configuration

Automatic Target Discovery

Cloud Control can now automatically discover potential targets on the hosts that it manages. Targets that are discovered in this way can then be promoted to managed target status. The feature also supports mass deployment of Management Agents to selected targets to facilitate target promotion. After a management agent is deployed to a host, it searches the host for manageable targets and reports any potential targets to Enterprise Manager, which you can choose to promote as well.

Out-of-Box and User-Defined Systems Support

The out-of-box systems feature supports discovery of Oracle-provided systems as a single entity, including discovery of targets that make up the system as well as the relationships between them. The user-defined systems feature enables you to model and monitor your application system infrastructure in Enterprise Manager by creating systems targets. System target creation involves choosing the targets of the system and defining how system availability should be computed. Both features provide richer support for monitoring the infrastructure systems of managed custom applications.

Relationships Dependency Collection

Data collection includes not only configuration properties, but also target relationships and dependencies, which allows for Configuration Management Database (CMDB) type analysis such as root cause and impact.

Extensible Configuration Collection

With the integration of Application Configuration Console blueprint technology, you can extend the collection of out-of-box targets by adding files, command output, and SQL query results to the collection. The additional configuration data is available to all standard configuration management features, including comparisons, search, history, and so forth.

Inventory Reporting

Enterprise Manager's Inventory Reporting feature enables you to quickly learn your current and historic database deployments, operating systems, and so forth. You can manipulate the data using target properties such as lifecycle, location, cost center, and so forth, to obtain a targeted list of assets as well. The information can be exported to a spreadsheet such as Excel for additional manipulation or distributed through e-mail.

Configuration Topology View

The Topology Viewer enables you to see and traverse target relationships that are automatically detected as well as those added manually. The Topology Viewer enables you to perform impact and root cause analyses and provides access to a target's main menu to take action.

Comparison Templates

Comparison templates enable you to control the comparison by ignoring obvious differences and noise to find the "needle in the haystack." Oracle ships default comparison templates for most target types, including database and WebLogic Server, which you can customize to you needs.

System Comparisons

System comparisons enable you to compare an entire application stack comprised of any number of components, which enables you to manage drift among lifecycle environments such as Development, QA, Production, and so forth.

Graphical Configuration Search

This release provides a library of out-of-box searches. In addition, you can easily build custom search specifications using a new graphical interface that leverages the target collection model, enabling you to choose from the model instead of entering SQL statements.

Relationship History

Configuration history now includes changes to relationships as well as to configurations. You can also be notified on changes to specific configuration properties or relationships.

Compliance Framework

The compliance framework has been completely revamped. The four-layer hierarchy follows industry standard best practices, making it easier to use and reusable. Compliance scores are always current while maintaining historical trending information.

Out-of-Box Compliance Standards

Enterprise Manager ships with over 30 compliance standards consisting of over 1700 individual compliance validations covering the entire stack including host, Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware, Fusion Applications, and more.

Self-Updatable Compliance Standards

Oracle posts new and updated compliance standards as they are developed. You can download and deploy these posted standards without having to upgrade Enterprise Manager itself. This enables the support of new products as they are released as well as access to updates to existing standards.

Real-Time Change Detection

The Management Agent now supports real-time event detection on supported platforms. The detection records the exact time of the event as well as who performed the action. Real-time monitoring can be used to detect events involving files, processes, database objects, users, and directory objects. You can manually or automatically mark these events as authorized or unauthorized, which automatically affects the compliance standard score.

Integration of BEA Guardian

The former BEA Guardian WebLogic health checks have been integrated into Enterprise Manager. In addition, custom health checks can also be created. Consequently, administrators are better able to verify that their WebLogic environment is in compliance with these standards.

Out-of-Place Patching

The out-of-place patching capability minimizes down time for database patching. This approach clones the existing Oracle home of the database and patches the cloned Oracle home instead of the original Oracle home. Similarly, after applying the patch, moving the database to the new location involves minimal down time.

Patch Templates

Patch templates enable phased rollout of a set of tested patches across an organization. A patch template contains a predetermined set of patches and deployment options saved from the source patch plan for which you can select a completely new set of targets. This approach reduces the time and effort required to create new patch plans and enables patch designers to expose only approved plans to patch operators.

Target Patching Enhancements

The following target patching enhancements are now supported:

• Patching of Oracle Fusion Application targets.

• Patching of Oracle Grid infrastructure targets, which are part of Oracle Exadata Database Machine, using both in-place and out-of-place patching modes. In addition, if you patch in out-of-place patching mode, you can now switch back to the old Oracle home.

• Application of one-off patches and critical patch updates across all managed servers within a WebLogic Domain. In addition to validation checking and rollback support, the new feature enables you to apply patches in a rolling fashion to avoid downtime.

Change Plans

A change plan is an Enterprise Manager object that contains a set of schema changes, which can be deployed to one or more targets at a time. A change plan can be generated from a schema comparison. The application developer can also generate a change plan in SQL Developer, while making changes to the schema as part of application changes. Change plans ensure consistent and repeatable deployment of changes, without depending on application developers to supply SQL scripts for their changes.

Data Comparison

You can now compare data and report on differences. This ensures consistency of application configuration data across lifecycle environments, which in turn ensures proper testing.

Synchronization of init.ora Parameters

You can now compare and synchronize some or all initialization parameters between two or more databases automatically.