The Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack covers the core functionality of the framework, and the hardware and OS management features of the product offering.
This pack facilitates the best way to leverage the infrastructure and operating systems in Oracle business service solutions.
Ops Center is designed to access and manage certain other software components and related data. In order to receive and use such software components or related updates, upgrades, and maintenance through Ops Center, you are always required during the term of your Ops Center license to have a valid license for such software components, and to comply with the terms of such license.
The Ops Center Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack includes the features described below.
Asset Management
Manage distributed assets from the same console. Leverage logical grouping and automated group assignment based on customizable attribute criteria. New hardware asset reporting down to the field replaceable unit (FRU) part numbers allows for quick searches. Automated correlation of server serial numbers to My Oracle Support contracts when connected to Oracle. New 2-D topology graphs with application awareness through Enterprise Manger Grid Control and network intelligence.
Enterprise Scalability
Architected and designed to take advantage of load balancing, complex network topologies, and large Agent environments.
Context-Driven User Interface
Feature-rich internet application that progresses the user through content-specific actions and workflow wizards.
Role Based Access Control
Roles that control a user’s access to the feature set can be granted universally or for specific groups of assets.
Disconnected Mode
Choice of the operator to remain connected to Oracle in order to receive the highest level of knowledge transfer automation and protection, or to run in disconnected mode from Oracle wherein the operator is responsible for uploading content into the Enterprise Controller.
Compliance Automation
Reporting capabilities to schedule tests against target nodes, point-in-time
comparisons, operational policies, or self-made software profiles. Version control over deployed files and a real-time connection to a U.S. government approved vulnerability repository for compliance checking.
Audit Reporting
Track software and configuration changes made with Ops Center through easily read reports.
Firmware Provisioning
Automatically download firmware from Oracle for servers and storage appliances.
Coverage includes Service Processor (ILOM/ELOM/ALOM/XSCF), RAID HBA
cards, and drive firmware. Ops Center automatically facilitates the remote network booting of the server off a mini-boot image in order to patch the drives.
RAID Device Configuration
Pre OS installation, and configure the RAID device that ships on many of Oracle’s X-series and T-series volume servers.
Bare Metal OS Provisioning
Automate Kickstart, Jumpstart, YAST, and DHCP configuration for the remote light-out provisioning of servers. Create profiles to capture finish scripts and
customization, and drive operational consistency. Leverage modules from Jumpstart Enterprise ToolKit (JET). Handle both ISO images and Oracle Solaris Flash Archive (FLAR).
Enhanced OS Patching
Leverage an enhanced dependency knowledge tree from Oracle across the four major operating systems: Red Hat, SuSE, Oracle Linux, and Oracle Solaris. Minimize downtime originating from software life cycles activities. Built-in awareness of Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade and alternate boot environments.
Remote Management
Leverage network protocols and the single system interfaces at the enterprise layer, where actions can be against many targets, rather than one for most of the exposed features.
Historical Monitoring
The ability to view past trends in monitored performance attributes.
Alarm Management
Alert correlation and aggregation under problems. Problems can be assigned to users left unassigned, closed, or acknowledged. Any problem in the product’s Message Center can be used to open a Service Request with My Oracle Support from within Ops Center. Attach site-specific annotations to alert types. Offer time/duration awareness to alerts as to not be alarmed on short resource spikes. Attach pre-defined operational plans and actions to alerts. Impose deactivation periods for maintenance windows.
Windows Support
Windows patching using an out-of-box integration with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. Ops Center provides the same user interface and similar capabilities for patching to Oracle Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and Oracle Linux. For Windows, Ops center offloads patching to Configuration Manager through an API. For other OS distributions, Ops Center patches them natively. Ops Center offers Windows comprehensive compliance reports and high-level performance monitoring with an agentless WMI connection.
Complex Plan Management
Ops Center offers the ability to create in-depth workflow plans by nesting server provisioning tasks into a comprehensive string of events. Formerly very distinct and separate tasks are now consolidated into a single plan. This increases consistency and allows for a greater level of abstraction, allowing more focus on the business service.
Oracle Solaris Cluster Support
Discover an Oracle Solaris Cluster environment and render its relationships to nodes properly in a new smart group. Full coverage of Oracle Solaris Cluster software in the
Ops Center knowledge repository. This enables Ops Center to deploy and upgrade a Oracle Solaris Cluster. Higher level of automation of patching tasks once an Oracle Solaris Cluster is identified. Any Oracle Solaris patch job executed on a Cluster node will do what must be done in terms of the rolling patch upgrades across Cluster nodes.
Full alarm integration with the Cluster framework. Display of configuration
information such as resource groups, quorom devices, global file systems, disk groups, memberships, and so forth in the Ops Center topology. In-context link and launch of Oracle Solaris Cluster Manager.
Network Fabric Monitoring
Discover and map Oracle 10GBe and Infiniband Switches, NEMs, and HBA devices from the server point of view. See switch and port configuration information. Monitor port quality of service. Full alarm integration with the Oracle Fabric Manager and lights-out management ports on the devices. In-context link and launch of Oracle Fabric Manager.
Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliances
Discover Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliances properly in the topology. Observe configuration and service information of the device. Full hardware fault coverage and alarm integration. Discover new shared storage dynamically and present it
automatically as location choices in the Oracle Solaris container and Oracle VM Server for SPARC creation wizards. In-context link and launch of appliance Analytics
Dashboard.
Hardware Management
Increased level of hardware monitoring across the Oracle T-series, M-series, X-series, Network Appliances, and Storage Appliances. Granular information such as serial and part number for capable FRU components within the servers or devices. Deeper fault coverage from both the service processor and an improved on host agent so that a telemetry source is possible from both network location. Integration with Oracle Solaris FMA. Increased configuration possibilities on the various Oracle service processors.
M-series Dynamic Domains
Create provisioning plans that control the configuration of dynamic hardware domains. Choose UNI or quad configurations for processor boards. Select memory mirroring. Assignment of hardware resources is simplified. Offline or Online boards post provisioning. Remotely install Oracle Solaris on the resulting configuration. Save configurations and provision multiple M-series at the same time.
My Oracle Support Integration
As mentioned in the alarm management section, any problem discovered in Ops Center can be used to open a My Oracle Support Service Request automatically.
Leveraging the serial number and Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM)
configuration information, Ops Center is able to automatically validate the asset for support. Ops Center then exposes a way to enter in My Oracle Support users and their Customer Support Identifier (CSI) user names so that administrators can choose which identification information they want to include in the Service Request. From within Ops Center, you can observe the Service Request status as it is worked from within Oracle. See summaries on Service Request per user or per asset.
OS Performance Monitoring
Increased level of Oracle Solaris and Linux OS performance monitoring. Both real-time status of attributes and historical charting.
Set alarm thresholds on any attribute in the product and house them in a monitoring profile that can be provisioned across multiple boxes. Allow for ad-hoc actions and scripts to be run and their output captured.
Energy Awareness
View historical and real-time energy consumption of individual servers or groups of servers in both WATT and KwH in terms of cost. View CPU utilization, temperature, and fan RPM trending in order to increase diagnostics of heat situations. View CPU affinity calculations. Observe the top and bottom energy consumers in the datacenter.
Set the energy consumption policy on the server or groups of servers between Performance and Elastic modes.
Grid Control Integration
Experience a bi-directional integration between Enterprise Manager Grid Control and Ops Center. Discover targets as defined in Grid Control within the Ops Center
topology. View the alarm information for those targets from within Ops Center. Protect against an operator taking action against a server or virtual machine that is running a production application workload. View hardware, OS, and virtualization information from Ops Center within Grid Control. From within Grid Control, execute Ops Center OS patching jobs against defined profiles. Experience the highest level of software and configuration compliance possible across the application and OS layers. Protect against an operator troubleshooting a performance issue as an application problem when it is clearly a hardware issue. In-context link and launch in both products to each other.