Enterprise cloud computing's greatest value lies in its ability to deliver a business-driven IT infrastructure: one that shares resources across business applications and gives business units the freedom to take the IT resources they need.
To get there, IT must reduce complexity and let business users consume IT services on demand. But how do you move your existing IT infrastructure to a more efficient cloud model?
It starts with the ability to plan, set up, and manage all parts of the cloud from a single dashboard. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is engineered with this in mind. It provides all the necessary tools to build, deploy, and operate an enterprise cloud and gives stakeholders the choices they need to make the cloud work for them.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c builds on Oracle's unique ability to offer the entire software and systems stack—ranging from infrastructure to development platforms, to databases and business applications.
The combination of the Oracle stack and Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c delivers built-in manageability for the entire cloud lifecycle across your private and hybrid clouds. It gives you more choices, so you can deliver on the promise of cloud computing.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c manages every part of the cloud infrastructure so that you can lower the complexity of planning and setup. It helps you lay out a roadmap to the cloud and guides you through all the phases of the cloud lifecycle—including planning, testing, and deployment.
To plan your cloud, you first have to know what resources you have to work with. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c helps you discover all your existing assets with automated discovery. It finds your existing assets—including applications, virtual environments, databases, commodity hardware, or Oracle Engineered Systems—and prepares them to be managed as part of your cloud infrastructure.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is designed to seamlessly manage Oracle Engineered Systems, such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle Exalytics, which are optimized to meet the enterprise performance and scalability demands of the cloud and are unmatched in the industry.
New capacity planners and consolidation planners deliver recommendations for how to make the most of your current resources, including multivendor physical, virtual, and operations systems—as well as Oracle database, middleware, and application configurations, topologies, and dependencies.
Once you've got control of the sprawl of physical resources, Oracle Enterprise Manager's wizard-driven, role-based capabilities help you set up your cloud environment.
Setting up a comprehensive cloud to host and manage your business applications means giving the right tools to key stakeholders.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c helps administrators pool IT resources and automate workflows, and gives business users the freedom to create and define rules, privileges, and policies to tailor resource consumption to their requirements. For example, administrators can zone resources based on cost centers or quality-of-service requirements. They can also enable access controls, quotas, and retirement policies to design self-service options for cloud users.
Unlike competitive solutions, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c encompasses cloud management across both physical and virtual environments. It delivers industry-first advantages by integrating with Oracle VM 3.1 and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder. Oracle VM 3.1 enables administrators to automatically plan and provision cloud environments by incorporating VMs, resource pools, and zones.
Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder helps application developers model and package complex, multitier applications that are ready for users to consume with a self-service model.
These features are designed to take disparate resources and create a manageable whole. Once your cloud is set up, you're ready to begin deploying applications on demand, managing and growing your cloud.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c provides day-to-day management of the cloud through persona-specific views for cloud developers, cloud administrators, self-service administrators, and cloud consumers.
For cloud developers, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c provides a complete testing portfolio to test application changes as well as changes at the application, database, middleware, and hardware levels. Developers and administrators can test changes or new applications by capturing and masking real production workloads and replaying them in the cloud test environment.
Administrators who are responsible for the daily health of the cloud can track incoming requests and fulfillment status. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c automates many of the procedures to quickly add more servers and storage into the cloud infrastructure. It also lets them define policies based on either schedule or performance, and associate automated remediation actions such as scale-up, scale-down, or power-off with those policies.
When trouble occurs, they can drill down into the database, middleware, server, or storage layer and detect potential bottlenecks. As we'll see in our next chapter, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c also gives cloud business managers and administrators the tools they need to understand the experience of cloud end users.
To keep business applications running smoothly on the cloud, you need deep insight into services and transactions, and you need to know what users are experiencing.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c includes a business service management feature to help cloud administrators create composite applications, which represent all the end-to-end system components in the application environment. Now, they can create contractual SLAs for business services, and track and alert SLA violations in real time. A business transaction management feature allows administrators to see into the business context of each transaction, including the consumer context and the business payload. Administrators can rapidly locate performance bottlenecks, errors, and incomplete transactions.
Finally, the Oracle Real User Experience Insight feature builds a complete and accurate profile that details who cloud users are, where they are located, what they are doing, and whether or not their cloud application is delivering appropriate service levels. It combines metrics, such as frustrated users, slow pages, server errors, and content errors, into a single report called a violation count. Administrators can then view a user's session and even replay the screen view that they saw.
With your enterprise applications running on the cloud, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c provides comprehensive metering and chargeback capabilities that provide a transparent view into how many IT resources are being used, as well as when and by whom.
The centralized metering and chargeback mechanism lets you define models based on fixed cost, configuration (such as version, licenses) or utilization, or any combination of the above. It allows your IT department to meter resources at various levels, including host/VM level, database, middleware, and application.
For reporting, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is integrated with Enterprise LDAP directory systems so that it can traverse the organizational hierarchy and generate consumption reports at various levels—individual, departmental, geographical, or others. That information can then be fed into a billing tool such as Oracle's Billing and Revenue Management to generate invoices or chargeback details for the cloud's consumers.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c also provides historical views of your cloud's performance. Combined with the metering and chargeback capability, you can now manage, monitor, and optimize your cloud performance, capacity, and costs. Even though an IT organization may not actually charge services back to its business units, this information provides a transparent way to budget resources and optimize the cloud platform on an ongoing basis.
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Video: Zero to Cloud in a Matter of Minutes -
Video: The Enterprise Manager: Cloud Management -
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