This chapter describes how different use patterns affect resource utilization.
Enterprise Manager Ops Center is designed to support an increasing number of administration and management actions. Each type of action and management analysis impacts resource utilization on the underlying systems that support the Enterprise Manager Ops Center deployment. The management features that are used throughout a deployment will greatly affect the resource utilization and the demands of Enterprise Manager Ops Center on its host systems. It is therefore critical to understand the types of management activities to be conducted by Enterprise Manager Ops Center, as this will greatly affect the number of assets a deployment can manage.
Which services are enabled is often related to the Enterprise Manager Ops Center deployment model. For example, deploying an Agent to an Oracle Solaris 10 OS system will automatically enable virtualization management for Oracle Solaris Zones, which in turn increases the size of the state machine for that particular managed asset.
To simplify deployment, the following five use patterns are identified and compared:
Hardware Management: Management of server and chassis hardware through Enterprise Manager Ops Center.
Hardware and OS Provisioning: Management of server and chassis hardware and the ability to provision operating systems to the managed hardware.
Hardware, OS, and Update Management: Management of hardware, operating systems and deploying software updates to the operating systems.
Hardware and OS Virtualization: Management of hardware, operating systems, and virtualization features of Oracle Solaris 10 and 11.
Hardware management is performed from the Proxy Controller through the systems management Ethernet port on the servers or chassis. In this mode the majority of the utilization occurs at the proxy, which is responsible for performing initial discovery of the hardware and subsequent polling of the hardware for status and configuration changes.
Network sessions are initiated directly from the Proxy Controller to the hardware using specific server and chassis-type protocols that include, IPMI, SSH and SNMP.
Hardware management has a relatively low resource impact on the Enterprise Manager Ops Center host OS. The largest impact is on the network traffic emanating from the Proxy Controller to the target servers and the Proxy Controllers should be scaled appropriately.
Agents are not deployed for OS provisioning or pure hardware management, as no operating systems are being managed. OS provisioning is an action taken on managed servers and is executed primarily from the Enterprise Manager Ops Center Proxy Controller. The number of OS provisioning jobs that can occur in parallel is metered by the job management system, but OS provisioning does impart a greater load on the infrastructure.
This mode applies to Oracle Solaris 8, Oracle Solaris 9, and Linux-managed operating systems. Oracle Solaris 10 and 11 operating systems implicitly enable virtualization management. In this use pattern, Agents are deployed to the managed operating systems and update / software provisioning jobs can be completed. This increases the size of the state machine, as operating systems and their configuration are modeled and made available to the update and monitoring capabilities of Enterprise Manager Ops Center.
Oracle Solaris 10 and 11 Management adds in sophisticated virtualization management for Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM Server for SPARC. Managing these virtualization features involves exposing significantly greater operating system configuration and metrics to the state machine. This will increase the memory utilization at the Enterprise and Proxy Controller tiers. Oracle VM Manager for x86 requires the deployment of an Oracle VM Server x86 management environment. This does not add as much load as the Oracle Solaris technologies as the Oracle VM management infrastructure is managing much of the scale load.
Using all management features of Enterprise Manager Ops Center will place the largest resource utilization burden on Enterprise Manager Ops Center's host infrastructure. It is recommended that you only configure and use the co-located Proxy Controller for small installations or test environments. For any moderate sized or larger production environment, deploy one or more remote Proxy Controllers.
Our documentation library includes installation guides, an administration guide, reference materials, and examples to guide you through Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. The documentation library is located at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E40871_01/index.htm
For additional details about features, see the Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Feature Reference Guide. For workflows and end-to-end examples about how to use the software to perform an operation, see the Deploy How Tos tab and the Operate How Tos tab in the library. The Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Command Line Interface Guide contains information about the command-line interface.