Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides a comprehensive data center management solution for managing your physical and virtual systems in the data center. This software enables you to discover, provision, patch, virtualize, manage, and monitor the assets in your data center from a single browser user interface (UI).
Once you discover and manage your assets in Enterprise Manager Ops Center, provisioning and patching options are enabled for the assets. This guide takes you through the various options and procedures for provisioning and updating your systems using Enterprise Manager Ops Center.
The following sections provide a brief description of the chapters discussed in this guide.
OS Provisioning enables you to install operating systems onto systems that are attached to your network, making it easy to install one or many systems simultaneously. It does not require any manual interaction with the system to install the OS. All the actions can be performed on the system right from the Enterprise Manager Ops Center UI. You can automate the installation of the OS on your servers across the data center to maintain consistent configuration. You can even provision bare-metal systems from Enterprise Manager Ops Center.
There are three main tasks before provisioning an OS or firmware:
Import the required OS and firmware image and maintain them in the image library.
Create OS provisioning profiles that are applicable for different targets.
Apply the profile to provision the firmware or OS.
The provisioning profiles collects all the information such as type of target, OS image, timezone and language setup, required JET modules, disk partitions, naming services and network details. Apply the profile on the selected server and install the OS.
You can provision and update the following operating systems in Enterprise Manager Ops Center:
Oracle Solaris 8, 9, and 10
Oracle Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
SUSE Enterprise Linux
For detailed concepts and procedures, refer to Provisioning Firmware and Provisioning an OS.
After provisioning OS on your systems, it is essential to maintain your assets to the recommended and latest updates. To maintain your assets to latest updates, you must apply patches to your systems. Updating or patching is a complex task in a data center for an administrator. It involves downloading the patches from the appropriate vendor sites, look out for patch dependencies, testing your patches for the production environment, rollback your systems to previous state if the patch is not stable in your environment, and maintain consistent component configuration of your systems to the latest security updates.
Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides one stop solution for all the requirements for patching your assets. It provides you Update Profiles and Policies that help define which components must be installed and the level of automation of patch installation. Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides system catalogs that records the state of the system at any point of time. You can use these catalogs to rollback your systems to any previous configurations, or create a update profile out of it for consistent configuration in a data center.
Enterprise Manager Ops Center also provides solutions to update assets when the Enterprise Controller is in the disconnected mode.
For detailed information and procedures, refer to Updating an OS and Updating a Windows OS.
Solaris Live Upgrade technology enables you to run the Oracle Solaris OS normally while an administrator upgrades or performs normal maintenance on an inactive boot environment. This reduces the downtime required to update your OS and enables you to test the update before using it in the production environment.
You require a boot environment and alternate boot environment (ABE) to test the patches and apply the patches. You can create an ABE or use ABE that was created outside the Enterprise Manager Ops Center. It automatically discovers and manages the alternate boot environment, if any.
You can view the different environments, manage the environments, run update jobs on the ABE, synchronize the boot environments, and activate the alternate boot environment as the active boot environment.
See Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade for more information about Live Upgrade.
Reports help to check the compliance of the assets for the latest and recommended updates, and other audit purposes. There are variety of reports that can be generated for all types of OS. You can save the report templates and use them later. Enterprise Manager Ops Center provided interactive result viewer to view the report results. From result viewer, you can even initiate update jobs to make the systems compliant. You can download and save the report results in different formats such as CSV and PDF.
You can schedule the reports to be generated at required time period and intervals.
See Firmware and OS Update Reports for detailed procedure about creating reports for various operating systems.