Enterprise Manager Architecture

Enterprise Manager provides architectural options for deploying the Oracle Management Service (OMS), agents, and plug-ins to ensure necessary availability for Exadata monitoring and management. The following sections discuss key Enterprise Manager architectural components and deployment choices that are essential for preparing for Exadata discovery.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

To ensure the availability of mission-critical applications and their databases deployed on Exadata, it is essential that Enterprise Manager maintains a level of availability equal to the Exadata systems it monitors and manages. The recommended best practice for monitoring and managing Exadata in on-premises and hybrid cloud deployments using an on-premises management solution is to implement Enterprise Manager High Availability Level 4. This configuration offers the highest level of protection against failures, ensuring continuous monitoring and management capabilities.

For more information, see Enterprise Manager High Availability in Oracle Enterprise Manager Advanced Installation and Configuration Guide.

Enterprise Manager Plug-ins

Enterprise Manager plug-ins are modular components that extend the platform’s capabilities, enabling it to monitor and manage a wide variety of targets. Exadata hardware and software monitoring and management primarily rely on three specific plug-ins, while related capabilities, such as database monitoring and management, depend on additional plug-ins. Understanding these dependencies is crucial to ensuring that the Enterprise Manager OMS and agents have the necessary plug-ins at the appropriate patch levels for successful discovery, monitoring, and management of Exadata deployments.

Monitoring and managing Exadata across all deployment types require the Exadata and Systems Infrastructure plug-ins, which are deployed by default during Enterprise Manager installation. For on-premises virtual Exadata deployments, the Virtual Infrastructure (VI) plug-in is also necessary and must be manually deployed on both OMS and agents.

To ensure effective Exadata target discovery, monitoring, and management, it is imperative that OMS and agents are consistently patched to meet at least the minimum required Enterprise Manager release and Release Update (RU) specified for each Exadata hardware generation and software release. As a best practice, utilize the latest available RU within the specified supporting Enterprise Manager release series.

For detailed information on the Enterprise Manager platform and plug-in versions certified for the various Exadata hardware and software versions, see Exadata System Software and Hardware Versions Supported by Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-ins (KB492866) in My Oracle Support.

Exadata Components and Corresponding Target Types

Customer responsibilities for managing Exadata vary based on the deployment and infrastructure type. In on-premises deployments, customers are fully responsible for all monitoring and management tasks. Conversely, in OCI and multicloud deployments on shared infrastructure, Oracle cloud operations handles all Exadata Infrastructure monitoring, while customers are responsible solely for monitoring and managing resources within each Exadata VM cluster.

The following table outlines the Enterprise Manager (EM) target types and their corresponding plug-ins that represent various Exadata components across different deployment types and criteria:

Table 1-1 Exadata Deployment Types and Corresponding EM Targets

Deployment Type	Infrastructure Type	Environment Type	Component	EM Target	EM Plug-in
On-Premises	Dedicated	All	Exadata Database Machine	Database Machine	Exadata
All	Dedicated	All	Storage Server	Exadata Storage Server	Exadata
All	Dedicated	All	Storage Server	Exadata Storage Server Grid	Exadata
On-Premises	Dedicated	All	Database Server (Physical Server via ILOM)	Systems Infrastructure Server	Systems Infrastructure
On-Premises	Dedicated	Physical	Database Server (OS)	Host	Systems Infrastructure
All	All	Virtual	Database Server (VM Guest) – Internal view	Host	Systems Infrastructure
On-Premises	Dedicated	Virtual	Database Server (KVM host, Xen dom0)	Oracle Virtual Platform	Virtual Infrastructure
On-Premises	Dedicated	Virtual	Database Server (KVM guest, Xen domU) – External view	Oracle VM Instance	Virtual Infrastructure
On-Premises	Dedicated	All	Exascale Cluster	Oracle Exadata Exascale	Exadata
On-Premises	Dedicated	All	Management Switch	Systems Infrastructure Switch	Systems Infrastructure
On-Premises	Dedicated	All	Fabric Leaf Switch (InfiniBand, RoCE)	Systems Infrastructure Switch	Systems Infrastructure
On-Premises	Dedicated	All	Fabric Spine Switch (InfiniBand, RoCE)	Systems Infrastructure Switch	Systems Infrastructure
On-Premises	Dedicated	All	Power Distribution Unit (PDU)	Systems Infrastructure PDU	Systems Infrastructure
On-Premises	Dedicated	All	Rack	Systems Infrastructure Rack	Systems Infrastructure
OCI, Cloud@Customer, Multicloud@AWS, Multicloud@Azure, Multicloud@Google	Dedicated	Virtual	Exadata Infrastructure	Exadata Infrastructure	Exadata
OCI, Cloud@Customer, Multicloud@AWS, Multicloud@Azure, Multicloud@Google	All	Virtual	Exadata VM Cluster	Exadata VM Cluster	Exadata
OCI, Cloud@Customer, Multicloud@AWS, Multicloud@Azure, Multicloud@Google	Dedicated	Virtual	Autonomous Exadata VM Cluster	Autonomous Exadata VM Cluster	Exadata