| Oracle® Enterprise Manager Best Practices for Bare Metal Provisioning 10g Release 4 (10.2.0.4.0) Part Number E13664-01 |
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PDF · Mobi · ePub |
| Oracle® Enterprise Manager Best Practices for Bare Metal Provisioning 10g Release 4 (10.2.0.4.0) Part Number E13664-01 |
|
|
PDF · Mobi · ePub |
This chapter provides information about the prerequisites required to use the bare metal provisioning application and provides an overview of bare metal provisioning process.
Proliferation of low cost servers in our data centers has brought in a fresh set of management challenges. The well-acknowledged problems include the difficulty in managing consistency and compatibility across operating system and software deployments, server drifts and security vulnerabilities that lead to lack of compliance, difficulty in deploying software, difficulty in provisioning new servers with variety of configurations and applications, high cost of operation and difficulty in adapting to changes in workload of the environment. These lead to system administrators and DBAs spending significant amount of their time in software and server provisioning operations.
Oracle's answer to the Software and Server Management challenge is its Bare Metal Provisioning Application, which is a part of Provisioning Pack (available at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/mgmt_solutions/provisioning.html) of the Enterprise Manager Grid Control and Oracle Management Pack for Linux (available at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/omp_linux.html). Bare Metal Provisioning Application addresses the data center, server farm challenge to provision software and servers quickly, efficiently, and make them operational.
Bare Metal Provisioning Application provides server lifecycle management capabilities that enable one to build manage and optimize their server infrastructure. The application provides an automated, repeatable and reliable solution that:
Automates deployment of consistent, certified Linux operating system images along with other software on a larger number of servers.
Leads to faster, unattended deployment of software and operating systems.
Allows provisioning of middleware, Clusterware, Real Application cluster (RAC) etc. on top of Linux stack.
Provides a template-based approach for provisioning variety of Linux configurations with software on servers. This also ensures compliance to standards and consistency across all deployments.
Supports heterogeneous hardware and network configuration.
Automatically discovers bare metal and live target servers for provisioning.
Especially for Oracle software the application encodes best practices out-of-the-box for deployment and patching.
Results in 10x or more reduction in manual labor that leads to substantial cost savings.
The application uses standardized PXE (Pre Boot Execution environment) booting process for provisioning both bare-metal and live servers. It provides a role based User Interface, for easily creating Gold Images and initiating automated, unattended installs.
The Provisioning application can provision 32-bit and 64-bit variants of the following operating systems:
Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.0
Oracle Enterprise Linux 4.0 or higher
RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.0
RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4.0 update 2 or higher
RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 3.0 update 6 or higher
SUSE Linux (SLES) 10
The following steps should be followed for evaluating or using the Bare Metal Provisioning application:
Install or upgrade to the latest Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Release 4 (10.2.0.4) and apply the one off patch.
If you are using Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control version 10.2.0.1 or 10.2.0.2, then first upgrade it to version 10.2.0.4. Refer to the Enterprise Manager Grid Control Release 4(10.2.0.4) notes available at http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/oem.html
Patch 6129692 to the 10.2.0.4 Oracle Management Service (OMS)
Patch 7135845 to the 10.2.0.4 Oracle Management Agents
If you are using Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Release 3(10.2.0.3) and want to provision Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) using the provisioning application then apply the patches mentioned below. (But it is strongly recommended to upgrade the existing Enterprise Manager Grid Control deployment to the latest version 10.2.0.4 to benefit from the new features added in the latest release.) These patches can be downloaded from http://metalink.oracle.com/. To apply the patches, follow the instructions mentioned in the patch readme files.
Patch 5878342 and 5858325 to the 10.2.0.3 Oracle Management Service (OMS)
Patch 5912253 to the 10.2.0.3 Oracle Management Agents on the hosts that would be used as reference hosts for installing Oracle Enterprise Linux. This patch is not required if these management agents have been installed using the Agent RPM kit or the bare metal provisioning application.
Note:
For provisioning Oracle Enterprise Linux, one should have 10.2.0.3 Management Agent deployed on the reference host.Download the agent rpm kit from the following location:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/oem/htdocs/provisioning_agent.html
Following basic elements are associated with the provisioning application:
Components represent the primary building blocks that may be combined with other components as needed, to specify the complete software configuration or image that is provisioned on target machines. Imagine components as ingredients and image as a final recipe cooked using the various ingredients. A component can represent Operating system software, Oracle software or any third party software and applications. Software components are individually maintained within the Oracle Software Library. Versions, states and maturity levels can be associated with each component.
Directives can be imagined as instructions to cook the final image (recipe) using components (ingredients). These are constructs used to associate scripts with software components and images. These scripts contain directions on how to interpret and process the contents of a particular component or an image. Directives encapsulate the script, the command line used to invoke the script, and the script configuration properties. They capture everything required for invoking the script on a machine during a provisioning operation. Directives are usually categorized based on the provisioning life cycle phases they are targeted for, or the actions they perform. Imagine Directives as set of executable instructions that run from a supported shell (for example, borne-again, Perl, Python), programming language (for example, Java), or execution framework or interpreter (such as "make" or "ant"). Directives are contained within a file that are stored in the Oracle Software Library and referenced from the software components that employ them.
An image can be viewed as a set of components and may include required directives that form the required software configuration, which is deployed on the target machines. An image contains the complete software stack from operation system to application, in the form of its components. Images reference the components they logically contain by version (rather than include them directly). Images are stored in the Oracle Software Library and versions, states and maturity levels can be associated with them.
Maintains metadata and binary content for components, images, and directives. The binary content is maintained in a shared storage location. It allows maintaining versions, maturity levels and states of components, directives and images.
Network profiles are used to define the network properties of the hardware servers to be provisioned. Network profiles can be can be of three types:
Static: Use this type to specify all of the network properties manually. This type of profile can be applied to a single server only once.
Dynamic: Use this to use DHCP server to fetch the network properties for the target machine.
Network Configuration: Network Configurations provide a way to create a pool of IP addresses, which the provisioning application can use repeatedly until all the IP addresses in the pool are exhausted.
The activity to select an image and provision them on hardware servers is termed as an assignment. Assignments allow specifying properties (such as image properties, file system, root password, network profiles, port, IP address, etc.) that will be used during the provisioning of hardware servers. Assignments also allow for setting of advanced parameters like NTP, NIS, NFS and kernel parameters.
The provisioning process consists of following two high-level tasks:
Setting Up Provisioning Environment (Chapter 2):
Setting up Boot/DHCP server and Stage server, setting up RPM repository and Software Library (Section 2.3)
Configuring above entities in Enterprise Manager (Section 2.4)
Provisioning Linux using Bare Metal Provisioning Application (Chapter 3):
Creating Linux "Default Image" by scheduling a "Create Image" job and associating the image with a particular subnet (Section 3.2)
Staging the image on the Stage server (Section 3.4)
Powering up the bare metal machine on the subnet to begin the PXE-based OS boot and install process (Section 3.5)
The user needs to perform a one-time activity of setting up a Boot server, Stage server, and RPM repository that are required by the provisioning application. Once this infrastructure is set up, it can be used repeatedly for provisioning Linux on several bare metal machines. See Chapter 2 for more information.
The following sections outline the steps to provision Linux. See Chapter 3 for more information.
Enterprise Manager allows the user to create a Linux "Default Image" from Linux installation on a reference machine. The default image consists of an OS binary component along with directives required to stage and provision the image. Once an image is created, it can be associated with a subnet prefix or a set of MAC addresses. Doing this ensures that the image gets provisioned on bare metal machines in the specified subnet or having specified MAC address. See Section 3.2 for more information.
The user is required to stage the contents of the image, namely the binaries associated with the components, directives and other templates, on the stage server. This caches the image in the staging area in the subnet for improved performance and prepares the image to be provisioned. See Section 3.4 for more information.
Once the image is staged, it is ready to be provisioned on bare metal machines that are powered on in the subnet. When a bare metal machine is connected to the subnet, the Bare Metal Provisioning Application discovers the machine and boots it over the network using the PXE protocol. It then installs the operating system and the Enterprise Manager management agent on the server. Installing the agent makes the server a managed target in the Enterprise Manager console. See Section 3.5 for more information.
Figure 1-2 explains the sequence in the PXE process:
See Appendix B for a description of the PXE boot process.
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