1 Introduction to Lifecycle Management

1.1 Overview of the New Lifecycle Management Solutions

In today's world, with the cloud infrastructure, numerous low cost servers and software deployments on those servers have brought in a fresh set of lifecycle management challenges. The challenges range from discovering and monitoring the health of existing software deployments to provisioning new software deployments and maintaining them over a period of time.

Besides that, other problems include difficulty in managing consistency and compatibility across these software deployments and operating systems, managing configuration changes, and managing security vulnerabilities that lead to lack of compliance.

These lifecycle management challenges eventually force you to engage more human resources and devote significant amount of time in managing the data center operations.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (Cloud Control) offers lifecycle management solutions that help you meet all lifecycle management challenges easily by automating time-consuming tasks related to discovery, initial provisioning and cloning, patching, configuration management, ongoing change management, and compliance management.

Figure 1-1 illustrates the lifecycle management solutions offered by Cloud Control.

Figure 1-1 Lifecycle Management Solutions

Table 1-1 describes each of these lifecycle management solutions.

Table 1-1 Lifecycle Management Solutions

• Automatically discovers software deployments using IP scanning techniques (NMAP).
• Converts unmanaged software deployments to managed targets in Cloud Control so that their health can be monitored.
• Offers an integrated workflow for deploying Oracle Management Agents and discovering targets on selected auto-discovered hosts.

• Discovers bare metal servers and live target servers
• Provisions Linux operating system on bare metal servers (hypervisors and virtual machines)
• Associates patching templates with provisioning so that patches can be applied automatically once the operating system is provisioned
• Provisions of Oracle Databases, Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), Oracle Grid Infrastructure (for standalone servers and clustered environments), Pluggable Databases
• Supports initial setup through OneCommand utility and ongoing database provisioning for Exadata Database machines
• Provisions Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle SOA Suite, SOA Artifacts, Oracle BPEL, Oracle Service Bus, Java EE Applications, Oracle Application Server
• Supports mass upgrade of single instance, Oracle RAC, and Oracle RAC One database instances one at a time

• Offers an integrated patching workflow with My Oracle Support—access to recommendations, search patches, and so on.
• Orchestrates patching workflow using Patch Plans, including automated selection of deployment procedures and analysis of the patch conflicts.
• Validates patches for applicability in your environment, validates patch plans, and automatically receives patches to resolve conflicts.
• Helps you save successfully analyzed or deployable patch plans as patch templates, which contain a predetermined set of patches and deployment options saved from the source patch plan.
• Offers out-of-place patching (only for standalone databases), in-place patching, and rolling and parallel patching modes, both in offline and online mode.

• Captures database object definitions and initialization parameters at different points in time.
• Compares databases; compares baselines.
• Propagates changes from database definitions and initialization parameters captured in a baseline or from a database to a target database.
• Specifies, groups, and packages object metadata changes. Creates change plans from ad hoc changes, comparison-based differences, or developer tools.
• Compares data between a local and remote database, and determines how seed data customizations will be affected by application upgrades.

• Searches configuration data across the enterprise.
• Displays configuration data in the context of a single managed entity—configuration item types and properties, system configuration data, system target relationships, custom configuration data.
• Monitors change activity across the enterprise—includes changes both to configurations and to relationships, which are associations that exist among managed entities.
• Compares configurations of a particular target type using comparison templates, which enable you to ignore the obvious differences and set alerts on critical issues that need immediate attention.
• Identifies files and other configuration data that Cloud Control does not already collect from well-known target types or from a target type introduced as part of the custom configuration definition. Offers a set of custom configurations called blueprints, which lay out precisely the files and data to collect for a given platform such as Apache Tomcat.
• Creates new relationships between managed entities using the Topology Viewer or a generic system target type. Helps you perform dependency analysis and impact analysis on assets in your enterprise using the Topology Viewer.

• Evaluates the compliance of targets and systems as they relate to your business best practices for configuration, security, and storage.
• Advises of how to change configuration to bring your targets and systems into compliance.
• Helps you define, customize, and manage Compliance frameworks, Compliance standards, Compliance standard rules.
• Helps you test your environment against the criteria defined for your company or regulatory bodies using these self-defined entities

Enterprise Data Governance

• Provides the means to identify databases within the enterprise that potentially contain sensitive data, and then to evaluate the data within these candidates to determine if sensitive data exists.
• Uses metadata discovery to identify databases containing objects that are protected by security features known as Protection Policies.
• Discovers sensitive database candidates by identifying application signatures, a set of database objects such as schemas, tables, and views that are unique to a specific application.
• Performs metadata discovery automatically whenever a database target is discovered. This feature can be disabled if you want more control over when and how the metadata discovery job runs.
• Enables you to associate a sensitive database candidate with a new or existing Application Data Model (ADM) and set sensitive columns for the ADM.

Change Activity Planner

• Enables you to plan, manage, and monitor operations within your data center. These operations involve dependencies and coordination across teams and business owners, as well as multiple processes.
• Provides you the ability to create plans comprising of one or more tasks. Tasks can be associated with operations like a patch template, a compliance standard, or a manual job.
• Enables you to monitor all managed plans. This helps you to identify any issues that may delay the activity plan completion deadline.
• Prints plans that can be used for reporting purposes. Information includes overall summary across all plans, plan summary within a given plan, overall tasks across all tasks across plans, and task summary across tasks within a given plan.

The provisioning and patch management solutions are essentially based on deployment procedures, which are Oracle-supplied predesigned procedures that help you accomplish the provisioning and patching tasks. Deployment procedures contain a hierarchal sequence of steps, where each step might contain a sequence of other steps. Essentially, they encapsulate the workflow of all the tasks that need to be performed for a provisioning or patching operation. For more information about deployment procedures, see Chapter 50. For information about the default deployment procedure that you must use for your provisioning or patching operation, refer to the respective chapters.

1.2 Information Map for Lifecycle Management Solutions

Table 1-2 lists the chapters and sections relevant to the various lifecycle management solutions offered by Cloud Control. Consider this an information roadmap to learn about the solution and perform the required operations.

Table 1-2 Information Map for Lifecycle Management Solutions