Agent Deployment Options

Enterprise Manager agents must be deployed strategically to ensure comprehensive monitoring and high availability of Exadata Database Machine targets and their related components.

Bare Metal Exadata

For bare metal Exadata on-premises deployments, Enterprise Manager agents are deployed to each database server. Use the Enterprise Manager agent on each database server to discover the software running on that server, such as the operating system, database, ASM, and listener. Discover the Exadata Database Machine and related components from at least two of these agents. Ensure that each Exadata Database Machine–related target is monitored by two agents to provide high availability.

Virtual Exadata

There are two options for virtual machine (VM) Exadata on-premises deployments:

Option 1 (Similar to Bare Metal)

Deploy Enterprise Manager agents to each VM guest on every database server. Use the Enterprise Manager agent on each VM guest to discover the software running on that guest, such as the operating system, database, ASM, and listener.

Discover the Exadata Database Machine and related components from at least two of these agents, ensuring that each Exadata Database Machine-related target is monitored by two agents to provide high availability.

Option 2 (Split Monitoring Model)

In some environments, VM guests do not have access to the management network. For these environments, split monitoring between two sets of agents.

The first set of agents is similar to the first option, but is used to monitor only the software running on each VM guest. Deploy Enterprise Manager agents to each VM guest on every database server and use them to discover the operating system, database, ASM, listener, and related software.

The second set of agents is located on VMs external to the Exadata. Deploy Enterprise Manager agents to each of these external VMs. Discover the Exadata Database Machine and related components from at least two of these agents, ensuring that each Exadata Database Machine-related target is monitored by two agents to provide high availability.

Common Considerations

Agents installed on Exadata can only be installed on Exadata database servers, either on physical database servers or on VM guests (KVM guest or Xen domU), as per the options detailed in this section. Agents must not be installed on database server hypervisors (KVM host or Xen dom0) or on any other Exadata Database Machine components.

Note the following high-availability considerations when monitoring Exadata Database Machine and related component targets:

• Ensure that the two agents selected to monitor each Exadata component are located on different physical servers.
• Consider maintenance activities, such as patching, and which servers or clusters may be patched in parallel when selecting the two agents. For example, if patching occurs on even and odd servers separately, ensure the agents monitoring Exadata components are split between even and odd.
• Ensure that the agents monitoring Exadata components are deployed on VM guests or physical database servers that are least likely to be shut down or reimaged to avoid disruption to Exadata monitoring.