Enterprise Manager Prerequisites

Identify Gold Image for Agent

It is critically important to ensure that both Oracle Management Servers and agents are patched appropriately and consistently. A best practice is to use gold images for agent patching, as they can significantly reduce common challenges associated with agent patching and deployment.

Understanding how plug-ins are deployed to agents is essential for ensuring that agents are at the correct patch level to support discovery, monitoring, and management. Most importantly, the agent selected as the source for a gold image must include both the discovery and monitoring plug-ins for each plug-in type. After these plug-ins are deployed, the agent must be patched to ensure that all necessary patches are included in the subsequently deployed gold image agents. Failing to include and patch both the discovery and monitoring plug-ins in the source agent will result in unpatched monitoring plug-ins being deployed during target discovery on the installed gold agents.

Automatic plug-in deployment can sometimes result in only the discovery plug-in being deployed initially. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the monitoring plug-in is also pushed to the source agent before patching. This ensures that the patched source agent contains all the necessary updates. To achieve this, you may need to either manually push the required plug-ins to the agent or perform discovery of representative targets before patching the agent.

For more information on gold images and related agent patching considerations, see Managing the Lifecycle of Agent Gold Images in Oracle Enterprise Manager Advanced Installation and Configuration Guide.

Select Agent Deployment Option

Select the appropriate agent deployment option for Exadata Database Machine targets and their related components. For information, see Agent Deployment Options.

Install Oracle Management Agent

Deploy Enterprise Manager agents to each location required by the selected deployment option. If gold image agents are not used, ensure that the agents are patched appropriately after deployment.

Enterprise Manager Exadata discovery supports the use of either management network host name or client network host name for the compute nodes. When installing the Oracle Management Agent on the compute nodes, you should use the same host name as used in Oracle Clusterware.

You can identify the host name of the nodes in the cluster by running the olsnodes command on one of the compute nodes. It is recommended that a fully qualified host name, including the domain name, be used when specifying an Oracle Management Agent host name.

For important agent deployment considerations, see Agent Deployment Options.

For information on installing agents, see Installing Oracle Management Agents in Enterprise Manager Basic Installation Guide.

Manually Deploy Exadata and Related Plug-ins

Ensure that the necessary Enterprise Manager plug-ins are deployed to each OMS and agent that will monitor Exadata Database Machine targets and related components.

Exadata and Systems Infrastructure plug-ins are the default plug-ins and are available for use. The Virtual Infrastructure plug-in must be manually deployed in OMS as well as agent before starting the discovery process for virtual Exadata in on-premises deployments.

You may need to manually deploy the Exadata and related plug-ins to the agents on each of the compute nodes when upgrading an existing agent plug-in installation. Deploy the Exadata, Systems Infrastructure, and for virtual Exadata the Virtual Infrastructure plug-ins manually if an older version of the plug-in(s) has been deployed to the agent already and you would like to upgrade to the latest version of the plug-in(s) deployed on the OMS.

To determine if the Exadata, Systems Infrastructure, and Virtual Infrastructure plug-ins are deployed on each compute node and what versions they are, you have two options:

From a terminal window, run the following command:
```
emctl listplugins agent
```
Note:

The emctl listplugins agent command must be run on the agent host using the emctl in the agent installation directory.
From Enterprise Manager, click Setup, Extensibility, and then Plug-ins.

To manually deploy the Exadata and related plug-ins:

From the Enterprise Manager home page, click Setup, Extensibility, and then Plug-ins.
On the Plug-ins page, select the plug-in of choice from the Name list.

Note:

See Exadata System Software and Hardware Versions Supported by Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-ins (KB492866) in My Oracle Support for the latest supported plug-ins. Oracle recommends that you deploy the latest version of the Exadata and related plug-ins to the agent.
To deploy the plug-in on Management Servers first, follow the instructions in Downloading, Deploying, and Upgrading Plug-Ins in Enterprise Manager Administrator's Guide.
To deploy the plug-in on the Agent, click Deploy On, then Management Agent.
On the Deploy Plug-in on Management Agent pop-up, click Add. A search pop-up will appear to allow you to search for targets to add. In the Target Type drop-down, select Agent, then click Search.

Select a Target name from the results list and click Select. Repeat for each agent target.
After you have added the agents, click Next on the Deploy Plug-in on Management Agent screen to review and verify the agent information.
Click Deploy to deploy the plug-in to the agents.
Once the plug-in has been deployed to all agents, a confirmation screen will appear. Click OK to dismiss the pop-up or Show Status to display the status of the agent in the Enterprise Manager Deployment Activities screen.