Oracle Blog Aggregator
GSI Architecture Strategy:Maintenance
Continuing a series of posts on Global Single Instances architecture strategies. This one’s a touchy subject: maintenance.
Maintaining a Global Single Instance presents a number of unique challenges to the IT organization, all of which can be overcome with some common sense, discipline and by taking advantage of all of the relevant features that the software and hardware infrastructure offer you.
Where for art thou Downtime?
The most obvious challenge for GSI maintenance is finding downtime to execute the maintenance. What influences the (potentially) available downtime? Key influences on downtime are listed below in no particular order.
Instance Status
Typically it costs more to have a production instance offline than a project instance.
However, one usually has more project instances to maintain as there is usually a many-to-one relation of project to production instances. Furthermore, project instances often need to be maintained more frequently to support project progress or to promote patches through the test instance set to production.
In some cases project instance downtime can be very costly. The cost of project team delays (including expensive consultant time) can add up quickly and is frequently overlooked.
Equal care can be required in planning project and production instance downtime depending on the project phase.
Instance Functional Footprint
The downtime cost for an instance depends to a degree on the business processes supported by the instance.
Revenue side or customer-critical operations (e.g. billing, manufacturing, shipping or some CRM functions) carry a higher downtime cost to the company.
These business processes can frequently have a 2- or 3-shift or 24x7 character.
Timezones
The more "global" an instance is (the number of timezones to be supported) the more difficult it can be to find a maintenance window that does not impact production (or project) operations somewhere. This can be made even more difficult when you add a new region to the program (e.g. adding project operations in Asia-Pacific to instance with Americas & EMEA) or dealing with regions with a shifted workweek (e.g. Sunday - Thursday)
System Overheads
Some system aspects do not impact the available downtime as such, they impact the scope of what has to be executed in each maintenance window. Examples of this are multiple languages installed (linear impact on number of patches to be installed) and synchronization feeds to reporting instances/DWH (requiring stop/start/resynchronize time in the window).
GSI Maintenance Management
Each of the influences on downtime can be be mitigated.
Communication First
First and foremost all maintenance schedules need to be clearly communicated, highly visible to all relevant parties and frequently updated with the planned activities to be executed in each window. Communication needs to be a combination of static information on the project/IT website on the standard maintenance windows and similar relevant information and dynamic updates via email blasts, news/rss updates on the planned activities for each window and maintenance start/stop notifications. All of this builds an operational environment where maintenance is an expected element of the landscape and there are no surprises when an instance goes offline for patching or other maintenance.
Planning
Allied with communication, plan the instance maintenance windows 6 - 12 months in advance (for *all* instances) and publish the plan. This becomes a framework for negotiation (particularly with the project instances) but at least everyone is starting with the same baseline of information.
Slots and Kaizen
Use a kaizen process of refinement to keep maintenance under control and drive performance.
Plan 2x - 3x per week windows for 4 - 6 hours (say) for project environments. Publish as SLA. Then drive to improve to get to 1x or 2x per week.
Plan 1x per week 4 - 8 hours window for production environment(s). Publish as SLA.
Then keep driving process improvements to get to 2x per month, then 1x per month then 2x per quarter...
Remember it is not about the starting point, it is about the journey of continuously reducing the frequency of planned downtimes and improving reliability and predictability of the process.
Which Slot? Timezones
As stated in the section on influences - timezone coverage can squeeze your maintenance window slots badly. But you can also take advantage of this. Maintenance windows from 0200 - 0600 CET can also be expensive in terms of overtime if your data center staff are also in the CET timezone.
Using (for example) staff based in IST (India) combined with PST (California) or EST (East Coast US) can mitigate this very well and give 24x7 coverage. Make the timezones work for you.
Use Available Technology
Invest time in understanding how to get the best out of the technology you have and what additional technology you may need to acquire to meet your downtime requirements. I will always recommend colleague Steven Chan’s excellent blog for more detail on this subject – but here is a grab bag of suggestions to follow…
- Invest in the hardware infrastructure (e.g. disk technology) to speed backup and recovery operations
- Hot backups must be routine
- Use the well documented features of Oracle E-Business Suite to minimize patching time. Some examples:
- Minimize the number of individual patches and human interference in patching by merging patches
- Minimize the software distributions to be patched by consolidating to a single shared software directory
- Run the patches faster by spreading multiple parallel patch utility worker processes over multiple servers
- Install patches in offline staging area (staged APPL_TOP technique)
- Analyze which patch (components) can be installed hot according to Oracle Development guidelines
Categories: Niche Blogs
links for 2009-05-08
- Top 10 Components for Oracle UCM (Fusion ECM) Billy Cripe shares the list of "top 10 components for Oracle Universal Content Management" he presented as part of a talk at Collaborate09. (tags: ecm contentmanagement web2.0 enterprise 2.0)
- George F. Colony's Blog: The Counterintuitive CEO: How can CEOs understand social technologies? "You can't understand Twitter, Facebook, or blogging by reading an article in a magazine or a report from your CMO," says George Colony. "Sure, they can tell you what they are, but you won't be able to truly understand how they could change your business unless you actually use them." And even then it may be a tough sell... (tags: socialmedia CIO)
- Scalable Applications: State of Bliss or State of Confusion? (Application Grid) "One of the fundamental rules of making scalable architectures is to introduce as little stateful behavior as possible," says William Dettelback -- a statement he admits isn't all that profound. "Any architect worth his salt will understand that state requires persistence, and that means a performance hit. For example, most real applications have things like shopping carts, in-flight transactions and so forth. The answer is not to simply make all applications stateless- there are very few business problems that get solved that way. So the architect is forced to deal with user state." (tags: applicationgrid)
- Rittman Mead Consulting » Blog Archive » Collaborate’09, and Optimizing the Performance of the BI Apps Data Warehouse Couldn't make it to Orlando for Collaborate09? No problemo. Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman provides a nicely detailed overview of his “Optimizing the Performance of the Oracle BI Applications Data Warehouse” presentation. (tags: BusinessIntelligence Collaborate09 oracle oracleace)
Categories: Niche Blogs
The Beginnings of Skynet
Computers have come a long way, and many science fiction stories depict their continued maturation ultimately leading to Skynet, HAL, WOPR, etc. The internet represents a seemingly inexhaustible source of data, but its just data. Powerful search engines working in harmony on grids can find that data in milliseconds, but that's where computers stop. Until now.
You're probably thinking the next step in this evolution is artificial intelligence, but there's an intermediate step we're missing. First we need computers to derive some meaning from all that data. Computers must make sense of the data in order for it to be useful.
Enter Stephen Wolfram and the Wolfram|Alpha project. Not since the Segway has there been this much hype around a new technology, and its potential to impact the world.
From the Wolfram|Alpha team...
Our overarching goal, the “higher purpose” of this project, is to make all computable, factual knowledge available to everyone. What Wolfram|Alpha does is compute on top of those facts—answering questions, solving equations, providing insights, projecting future behaviors, and more.
Now instead of searching for data, you can search for answers. But how did they do it? There are three basic ingredients. First, they assembled a large amount of verified, accurate data. Then they programmed a vast number of formulas and computations using a tool called Mathematica. Lastly, they created the interface to combine the two based on the question posed.
A few select people have been invited to use the system, and their reports have been impressive. It will be exciting when the project is finally revealed to the public, but keep in mind that it will always be a work-in-progress.
I wonder how this new advancement will impact the way we shop for products online. Will it make it easier to find exactly what product fits our needs best? Or is it just another step toward the machines exterminating us?
Categories: Niche Blogs
OTN Arch2Arch Podcast Show Notes: SOA Governance – Getting it Wrong
The final segment in the three-part discussion of SOA governance issues now available.
In SOA Governance – Getting it Wrong, SOA author Todd Biske and Oracle SOA Governance experts Cathy Lippert (blog) and Sharon Fay wrap up their discussion of SOA Governance issues with a look at where most organizations get governance wrong. Listen.
About the panelists
- Cathy Lippert, Director of Product Management for SOA Governance at Oracle. Cathy is one of the visionaries behind the Flashline and BEA solutions that have evolved into what is now known as Oracle Enterprise Repository. Cathy is also a contributor to the SOA Governance @ Work blog.
- Sharon Fay, Product Manager for Oracle Enterprise Repository. Sharon has developed and implemented best practices for improving productivity through SOA Governance and has written extensively on the subject. Sharon also made the transition from Flashline to BEA to Oracle.
- Todd Biske, Senior Enterprise Architect with Monsanto. Todd is the author of the book SOA Governance from Packt Publishing, and also writes on SOA and other strategic IT topics on his popular Outside the Box blog.
Next week
Oracle’s David Chappell and Clemens Utschig-Utschig join special guest, top-selling SOA author Thomas Erl, to talk about contributions by members of the Oracle community to Erl’s new book, SOA Design Patterns.
Stayed Tuned: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/OtnArch2Arch
Technorati Tags: oracle,otn,soa,soa governance,todd biske,enterprise repository,arch2arch,podcast
Categories: Niche Blogs
Yeah, we had a good time at Collaborate
Oraclenerd (a blog you should definitely be reading) evaluates my session. WIN for ECM. WIN for BillyCripe. Win for Oracle.
Categories: Niche Blogs
Oracle VM: A Peek Into the Future
I haven't been blogging the last couple of weeks as I've had some internal deadlines, but luckily you've seen some good content from others on the Oracle VM team, including Honglin's entries below.
This time, I want to call your attention to a couple more blog entries from the team that are on another blog - this time the blog of my boss Wim Coekaerts, VP of Linux and Virtualization Engineering where he talks about some Oracle VM (or closely related...) projects that are particularly cool, namely our up-coming management CLI and webservices API, but also the OCFS2 "Reflink" project. Reflink is generically extremely useful for about any application, but is also intended to benefit Oracle VM in particular in expected up-coming releases.
These projects are expected to really increase the ability of users, integrators and other 3rd parties to automate processes around Oracle VM (API/CLI) as well as do things like radically improve performance and efficiency for things like cloning, provisioning, and snapshotting (Reflink).
Take a look.
Categories: Niche Blogs
Perl DBD::Oracle 1.23 released
In the "I guess I still need to blog until that Twitter thing becomes popular" category, let me say here that the Perl DBD::Oracle 1.23 module has been released by Pythian. John Scoles has a fresh article on the main new feature, better embedded type support. Nice work! The bar has certainly been raised for dynamic language support of Oracle features.
DRCP connection pooling support is on the roadmap for the "beer" release 1.24 according to Paul Vallee of Pythian.
If you were wondering about the naming, 1.23 is the "Sesame Street" edition because it is 1-2-3. The 1.24 release is the "beer" release presumably because there are 24 cans in a slab of beer.
Categories: Niche Blogs
Scalable Applications: State of Bliss or State of Confusion?
One of the fundamental rules of making scalable architectures is to introduce as little stateful behavior as possible. That isn't really a very profound statement- any architect worth his salt will understand that state requires persistence, and that means a performance hit. For example, most real applications have things like shopping carts, in-flight transactions and so forth. The answer is not to simply make all applications stateless- there are very few business problems that get solved that way. So the architect is forced to deal with user state. But where to put it?
Way back when J2EE was young, it was thought that Stateful Session Beans might help (don't even get me started on EJB 1.1 Entity Beans). That discussion was over as soon as the first application using them needed to scale. Not to beat up on SFSBs necessarily- in theory they are a wonderful thing- but in practice they didn't pan out. Why is that?
Most developers really don't want to deal with user state management. It just feels "right" that the underlying application infrastructure should take care of it for you. But in practice, every customer I've ever talked to wrestles with this constantly in their architectures. There still remains a need to handle user state information in an elegant and scalable fashion. So the solutions that have been created over the years are:
a) Put the state in the database. Not a bad choice as hardware and networks continue to get faster. But you're still introducing a bottleneck behind your app servers.
b) Put the state into memory. Clearly the fastest choice, but not terribly fault tolerant and very difficult to share across JVMs.
c) Put the state into the client. Not everyone has the ability to accept cookies in their browser, not to mention the security implications.
Option 'b' seems to be the recurring favorite for most architects- it's hard to beat memory for pure speed and convenience. Many strategies have been developed to make "shared memories" across JVMs that adhere to various levels of transaction atomicity and consistency. These have ranged from WebLogic Server's own built-in session replication mechanism to elaborate JMS based pub/sub systems. But at the heart of these solutions are usually two challenges for large farms of JVMs:
1) limited state size (e.g. replicating 10MB for each user between many JVMs is just not practical)
2) overly complex configuration (e.g. who wants to maintain a giant rats nest of JMS topics and subscribers?)
This is precisely where Application Grid comes into the picture. Application Grid is primarily an approach whereby we introduce a way to handle our option 'b' above without the associated limitations or complexity.
A key part of Application Grid is the ability to establish a Data Grid layer between the app server and data sources. Think of the Data Grid as that "shared memory" that each JVM in an application server tier can use to handle stateful information. The Grid is built of nodes- each node contains some set of state information that is relevant to its clients. The Grid takes care of replicating the state across its own nodes automatically so that your applications (or even your application server) doesn't need to.
The Grid is scalable- add more nodes and it handles more load. The Grid is fault tolerant- take away nodes and you introduce request latency, not access failure. And finally the Grid is really simple- basically it's java.util.Map- how much simpler can it get for your developers? To boot, it also layers on top of WebLogic HTTP sessions and underneath TopLink JPA as an L2 cache.
Stateful applications are here to stay, and yet stateless architectures are a proven thing. Using a Data Grid approach can give you the best of both worlds without all of the headaches. We will explore some more use cases in future blog posts- stay tuned!
Categories: Niche Blogs
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance
Detailed write-up by Craig Blitz, Coherence product manager and self proclaimed part time humanist :), on Oracle University offered Coherence course. http://tinyurl.com/ctap9a
Categories: Niche Blogs
PHP 5.3 Release Candidate 2 is available
PHP 5.3 is approaching the pointy end of development and it's worth me blogging so awareness and testing increases before general release.
The second release candidate for PHP 5.3 has been announced. Source code is http://downloads.php.net/johannes/. Windows binaries are at http://windows.php.net/qa/.
There is a wiki page with upgrading notes. Updates are welcome either directly or via discussion on the "internals" mail list.
In a parallel note, there is a surge of energy around this year's PHP TestFest. The wiki page contains lots of useful information - including mentor lists and reusable presentations - about running and contributing to your own local testfests.
The PHP gcov code coverage numbers show there are lots of areas that can be improved to.
If you're coming to PHP|Tek (in Chicago from May 19th), there will be a testfest one evening. See you there.
Categories: Niche Blogs
Interview with Anthony Lye, SVP CRM, for the first edition of CIO Industry Insight
Listen here as CIO Editor Matt Rodgers speaks to Anthony Lye, Oracle Senior VP of CRM, about Oracle's CRM strategy, how the company is fending off the challenge from SaaS CRM vendors and what CIOs need to know about the latest trend in CRM solutions, Social CRM.
Categories: Niche Blogs
Using the PDE Wizard
With the new Experimental Update site, there are now PDE plug-ins for extending the JRockit Mission Control Console. The wizards greatly reduces the time needed to start writing your own tabs, actions and constraints.
This is basically a very short tutorial on how to use them.
Install the PDE plug-ins
- First make sure you have Eclipse 3.3 or 3.4 installed.
You will need the plug-in builder edition. - Next make sure that you have installed JRockit Mission Control 3.1.0 into your Eclipse.
The update site is here: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/jrockit/missioncontrol/updates/base/3.1.0/eclipse/index.html - Next install the PDE plug-ins from the experimental update site.
The experimental update site is here:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/jrockit/missioncontrol/updates/experimental/3.1.0/eclipse/index.html
Worth noting here is that if you fall for the temptation to also include the JConsole meta plug-in from the experimental update site, you need to be running your Eclipse on a JRockit 1.6 based JVM for the plug-in to work.
Creating a JRockit Mission Control Console PDE project
In this example we’ll create an additional tab in the JRockit Mission Control console. The tab will subscribe to one or more values from the JVM, depending on which wizard you choose.
- Create a new Plug-in project by selecting File->New->Project… and then selecting Plug-in Project.
If that alternative is not available to you, ensure that you have installed the Plug-in Builder version of Eclipse. - Name your Plug-In Project by entering the Project Name in the New Plug-in Project Wizard. Then click next.
(e.g. com.example.mc.testtab) - Review the details in the Plug-in Content page and then click next.
- Select either the Mission Control Complex or Simple Tab wizard.
- Review the details in the tab wizard, then click finish.
You now have a project which should compile properly. The plug-in adds a tab to the JRockit Mission Control Console. There are other wizards, for instance one that add actions to the triggers tab in the the JRockit Mission Control Console.
Categories: Niche Blogs
The Experimental Update Site is Now Online!
Since the 3.1 version of JRockit Mission Control, it is possible to extend JRockit Mission Control in various ways. The first extensibility features that we’re releasing are for the JRockit Mission Control Console, with the next major version featuring the same sort of extensibility for the Memleak and JRA tools as well.
Together with exposing these extension points, we also wanted to provide plug-ins that facilitates building extensions for JRMC. Since these plug-ins, strictly speaking, are not part of the JRockit Mission Control product, we’ve tried to come up with a good way for distributing them.
Today we released the Experimental Update Site for JRockit Mission Control. It contains plug-ins for Eclipse and/or JRMC that either extends, or makes it easier to extend, JRockit Mission Control. In this first release, there is a PDE plug-in that provides wizards for extending the JRockit Mission Control console in various ways. There is also a JConsole meta plug-in, that allows you to run JConsole plug-ins in JRockit Mission Control. IMHO, using the PDE-plug-ins to build a native JRMC version of the plug-in is the better way to go. ;)
Everything in the experimental update site is provided as is – it is unsupported functionality, and the plug-ins may be revised and updated without notice. Please use the forum if you have any questions or want to report problems with these plug-ins.
Have fun!
Categories: Niche Blogs
Oracle Education Foundation Partners with Professor Garfield Foundation on Literacy Initiative for K-8 Students
Oracle Press Release Oracle Education Foundation Partners with Professor Garfield Foundation on Literacy Initiative for K-8 StudentsStudents Will Use ThinkQuest Learning Platform to Collaborate on Digital Comic Books Redwood Shores, CA – May 7, 2009News Facts The Oracle Education Foundation (OEF) has partnered with the Professor Garfield Foundation on a digital story-telling initiative designed to increase literacy among K-8 students. Participating students will create digital comic books, using OEF’s ThinkQuest platform to connect with peers online and share ideas. ThinkQuest is a protected, online learning platform that enables teachers to integrate learning projects into their classroom curricula and students to develop critical 21st century skills, including communication, teamwork, and technology skills. Students will have the opportunity to get creative and enter their work into OEF’s ThinkQuest Narrative Competition. The ThinkQuest Narrative Competition challenges teams of students from all over the world to publish their ideas on global topics. Qualifying entries are published in the ThinkQuest Library, the world’s largest online repository of student-developed learning projects.Supporting Quotes “The Oracle Education Foundation is proud to partner with the Professor Garfield Foundation,” said Clare Dolan, Vice President, Oracle Corporate Citizenship. “By providing students with access to ThinkQuest, we give them space to share ideas and unleash their creativity.” Jim Davis, Garfield’s creator, said, “The Professor Garfield Comics Lab Extreme program puts ‘digital tools’ into the hands of a ‘digital generation.’ The partnership between the Oracle Education Foundation and the Professor Garfield Foundation will allow children to collaborate on a global stage in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago. Children will be able to create a graphic novel that combines a variety of multimedia assets, such as imagery, text, audio, video, and animation. This will take storytelling to a whole new level.” Supporting Resources Oracle Education Foundation ThinkQuest Professor Garfield FoundationAbout the Professor Garfield Foundation
The Professor Garfield Foundation was founded by Garfield cartoonist Jim Davis and Ball State University to create digital education and entertainment with a primary emphasis on children’s literacy. The FREE website, www.professorgarfield.org is a fun interactive online environment where children can safely explore, learn and creatively express themselves. The Foundation (PGF) was formed in 2003 as a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit organization to provide children, parents, and teachers an opportunity to enhance and support classroom learning in new and innovative ways.
About the Oracle Education Foundation
The Oracle Education Foundation is a nonprofit organization funded by Oracle. It delivers ThinkQuest, a widely acclaimed education technology program, to K-12 schools globally. ThinkQuest is a protected, online learning platform that enables teachers to integrate learning projects into their classroom curriculum and students to develop critical 21st century skills. For more information, visit http://www.oraclefoundation.org.
About Oracle
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest business software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.
TrademarksOracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.Contact Info
Kimberly Pineda
Oracle
+1.650.506.8831
kimberly.pineda@oracle.com
Categories: Business Intelligence, Oracle News
Journée Partenaires du 3 février 2009
Cette présentation correspond au Kit Avant-vente OBA EBS.
voici les slides
Categories: Niche Blogs
RAC and ASM on Linux Forum Meeting, June 3 at Beit HP in Raanana
On June 3 we will have the next conference of the RAC/ASM/Linux forum, this time at Beit HP, in Raanana, Israel.
RAC, ASM and Linux are building blocks of the HP Oracle Database Machine and we wanted to start this meeting with a review of the technology revolution that Exadata is bringing in. Ehood Baratz from HP will introduce the concepts and Annie Flint from Oracle RACPack Team, that is already working on implementation projects with customers around Europe, will provide a deep technology analysis.
This will be followed by two Customer Case Studies:
Dina Raphael from Rafael will present their implementation case of Oracle Applications on a 3 Node Linux Cluster with 11g CRS and ASM and 10g RDBMS. They are using ASM Diskgroup rename to mount several clones of the production database on the same development server, Dina's implementation has become a reference in Israel and Europe for implementations of Oracle Applications on Linux with 11g RAC and ASM.
The second case will be presented by Alon Spiegel, Senior Oracle Technology Consultant and CEO of Brillix. This is a large implementation that required higher availability, achieved using both RAID 1 + ASM Normal redundancy with failure groups located on a campus cluster, and highest performance. A very interesting design, implementation and testing effort worth to hear about.
Beit HP address is 9 Dafna Street, Ra'anana Industrial Zone. Israel
The Conference will start at 14:00
You can download the program here: Download file
Please feel free to contact me with any questions you would like to see addressed on the meeting: alejandro.vargas@oracle.com
Categories: Niche Blogs
What’d You Say?
Oracle OpenWorld 2008 Survey Results
At the close of Oracle OpenWorld 2008, some of you shared your opinions of the show through our Oracle OpenWorld 2008 Conference Survey. We gave you a little encouragement to participate by offering a $1,000 American Express Travel Gift Certificate to four lucky participants. Our gift certificate winners were:
• Mr. Vilas Ankolekar, Xerox
• Ms. Emily O’Mara, Louisville Water Company
• Mr. Curt Swartzendruber, Alltel
• Ms. Melissa Seger, Visa
We’d like to share some results with you, but be forewarned; we’re going to give you a lot of percentages. Here’s the first: almost 20% of the Full Conference attendees responded to the questionnaire.
While 81% of the responses came from attendees based in North America, we also received feedback from around the world. Those of you in Europe—specifically the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Germany—provided us with the second-highest response rate (10%), and the Asian-Pacific region represented our third largest (3%).
We discovered that most of you came to hear about Oracle’s roadmap and vision for the future. Others wanted to meet Oracle product and services experts, learn tips and tricks for products you’re currently using, or improve your overall technical proficiency and knowledge. A whopping 90% of you said that you were “Satisfied” (63%) or “Very Satisfied” (27%) with the show’s ability to deliver on your objectives. The remaining 10% felt “Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied” (8%) or “Dissatisfied” (2%).
You seemed to like the information we provided to you before the show—83% of you thought the Oracle OpenWorld Web site was “Good” (50%) or “Very Good” (33%). The breakdown for our e-mail updates was similarly positive: “Good,” 48% and “Very Good,” 28%.
Some places where it seems we could be doing better is in our direct marketing and—gasp!—this blog. A slight majority, 52% thought our direct marketing was “Good” (39%) or “Very Good” (13%), while 20% of you thought it was “Average.”
For the blog, 11% of you thought it was “Very Good,” 30% thought it was “Good,” and 11% thought it was “Average.” Although a few of you thought it was “Fair” (2%) or “Poor” (1%), the number that concerned us most was the 45% of respondents who marked “Not Applicable.” To us, this means we’re not reaching as much of our target audience as we had hoped. If you have suggestions on how we can change that, please let us know. We want this to be one of the most valuable resources before, during, and after the show for every attendee.
Besides the blog, we provided a number of ways to keep up with show information during the conference. You liked the Content Catalogue: “Good” (48%), “Very Good” (22%). Schedule Builder also fared well: “Good” (37%), “Very Good” (32%). We want to keep you in the loop while you’re at the Moscone Center, so we will continue to make improvements on how we share session details with you.
You gave high marks to the sessions’ content, speakers and presentations. Your highest praise went to the presentations, with 80% of you saying they were “Good” (57%) or “Very Good” (23%). Our speakers received the next-highest rating with 76% of you voting them “Good” (57%) or “Very Good (19%). Your review of our content for sessions was almost as stellar; 57% rated it “Good” and 17% scored it “Very Good.”
When you weren’t involved with the show’s sessions, you seemed to take advantage of the Exhibition Halls and Oracle DEMOgrounds. According to the results, more of you headed to the Exhibition Halls, with 46% voting that they were “Good,” 12% voting “Very Good,” and only 5% reporting “Did not attend.” Our responses indicated that the DEMOgrounds did not get the same amount of foot traffic, however, with 21% of you saying that you “Did not attend.” Of those who did, 42% found it “Good” and 19% thought it was “Very Good.”
The 2008 conference was the first Oracle OpenWorld for nearly half of you (48%). Almost two-thirds of you thought the value of the conference was Good” (47%) or “Very Good (16%). Our attendees tend to be at the forefront of using technology to cut costs, drive innovation, and improve data sharing. That’s why nearly 90% of you expect to be back for Oracle OpenWorld 2009.
In your survey comments, we heard that you appreciated the green initiatives we set up. Another response urged us to make Oracle OpenWorld a week long! Our favorite, though, was, “The only downside to the conference is that I have to wait another 365 days till the next one.” Thankfully, that number has dwindled to 157. Early Bird registration for Oracle OpenWorld 2009 is open now. Tell us what you’re looking forward to at the upcoming show by leaving a comment here.
Categories: Niche Blogs
Oracle VM Manager CLI and Web Services API
For the last several months we have been working on a web services api (wsdl) and a command line interface (cli) for Oracle VM Manager. The cli uses the web services interface and is written in python so it can run on any platform where python is installed. The API exposes all the interfaces that the Oracle VM Manager UI components call, such as : manage server pools, servers, virtual machines, templates,...
It is now very easy to manage your Oracle VM server pools and virtual machines from a shell prompt. I was playing with this yesterday and figured I would take this opportunity to post an example.
In this example below, I had installed Oracle VM Manager (but not yet logged into it) and installed the cli scripts on one system and then I had installed Oracle VM server on another machine. On the Oracle VM server I had actually locally downloaded (manually) an Oracle VM template and created my own virtual machine without using the manager at all. So I actually create a new serverpool in Oracle VM Manager using the cli shell. I register my existing virtual machine and at the end show the list of commands we expose through the cli and through the webservices API. I think this is going to be very useful for many Oracle VM users.
configure the location of the Manager instance
wcoekaer@aldebaran-pc ~]$ ovm config
This is a wizard to help you start running the Oracle VM Command Line Manager.
Ctrl-C to exit.
Enter the host to connect:aldebaran-pc
Enter the port to connect:8888
Enter the deploy path (blank to default):
Enter the path of the vncviewer (blank to skip):
Would you like to enable WS-Security support? (Y/n)n
Configuration finish.
Please run the Oracle VM Command Line Manager again.
Starting up the cli in shell mode
[wcoekaer@aldebaran-pc ~]$ ovm -u admin shell
Enter Login Password:
Welcome to the Oracle VM Manager Shell. Type "help" for a list of commands.
I want to create a server pool but forgot the syntax
ovm> help serverpool_create
usage: ovm serverpool_create [options]
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-H HOSTNAME, --hostname=HOSTNAME
(Required) Server Host/IP
-s SERVERPOOL_NAME, --serverpool_name=SERVERPOOL_NAME
(Required) Server Pool Name
-a, --ha_enabled Enable High Availability
-A AGENT_PASSWORD, --agent_password=AGENT_PASSWORD
Agent Password
-U UTILITY_USERNAME, --utility_username=UTILITY_USERNAME
(Required) Utility Server Username
-P UTILITY_PASSWORD, --utility_password=UTILITY_PASSWORD
Utility Server Password
-L SERVER_LOCATION, --server_location=SERVER_LOCATION
Server Location
-D DESCRIPTION, --description=DESCRIPTION
Description
create my server pool, the Oracle VM server name is wcoekaer-srv4
ovm>serverpool_create -s mypool -A ****** -H wcoekaer-srv4 -U root -P ****** -L myoffice -D something
ServerPool "mypool" has been created
you can see it shows as the only pool (mypool)
ovm> serverpool_list
Server Pool Name Status HA
mypool Active Disabled
there are no images imported yet so lets import the virtual machine I had already created
ovm> image_list
Name Size(MB) ServerPoolName Status CreationTime
ovm> image_register -s mypool -n dom1 -u root -p ******* -c ****** -o "Oracle Enterprise Linux 5" -d mydom1
Registering, please check the status.
as you can see, it now shows up
ovm> image_list
Name Size(MB) ServerPoolName Status CreationTime
dom1 6229.0 mypool Pending 2009-05-05
but ! need to approve it of course
ovm> image_approve -s mypool -n dom1
VM Image "dom1" has been successfully approved.
and here it is, it shows that it's stil up and running because I did not shut down the virtual machine, no need to
ovm> vm_list
Name ImageSize Mem VCPUs Status ServerPoolName
dom1 6229.0 256 1 Running mypool
a list of all the options
ovm> help
Usage: ovm [options] subcommand [suboptions]
Oracle VM Command Line Manager.
ovm full list of subcommands:
agent_version --- Get an agent version
config --- Start a configuration wizard
group_create --- Create a User Group.
group_list --- List of all the groups.
help --- Show help
image_approve --- Approve a VM Image
image_del --- Delete a VM image
image_discover --- List all of the Discoverable VM images
image_import --- Import an Image from an External Source
image_list --- Get a list of VM images
image_register --- Register a Discoverable VM image
image_status --- Show the Image status
iso_approve --- Approve an ISO image
iso_del --- Delete an ISO image
iso_discover --- List all of the Discoverable ISOs
iso_import --- Import an ISO from External Source
iso_list --- Get a list of ISO images
iso_register --- Register a Discoverable ISO image
iso_status --- Show the ISO status
os_list --- List all the available Operating Systems
server_add --- Add a Server to the ServerPool
server_config --- Config a Virtual Server
server_del --- Delete a Server from the ServerPool
server_info --- Get a VM Server info
server_list --- Get a list of VM Servers
server_poweroff --- Poweroff a VM Server
server_restart --- Reboot a VM Server
server_status --- Show the server status
serverpool_config --- Config a ServerPool
serverpool_create --- Create a ServerPool
serverpool_del --- Delete a ServerPool
serverpool_info --- Get a ServerPool info
serverpool_list --- Get a list of ServerPools
serverpool_refresh --- Refresh all of the ServerPools
serverpool_restore --- Restore a ServerPool
serverpool_status --- Get a ServerPool status
shareddisk_create --- Create and Register a Shared Virtual Disk
shareddisk_del --- Delete a Shared Virtual Disk
shareddisk_list --- Get a list of Shared Virtual Disks
shell --- Launch an interactive shell
template_approve --- Approve a Template
template_del --- Delete a Template
template_discover --- List all of the Discoverable Templates
template_import --- Import a Template from an External Source
template_list --- Get a list of Templates
template_register --- Register a Discoverable Template
template_status --- Show the template status
use --- Sepcify a ServerPool to use
user_assign_group --- Assign a user to the Group.
user_assign_serverpool --- Assign a user to the ServerPool.
user_create --- Create a User Account.
user_list --- List of all the users.
vm_add_disk --- Create and Add a disk to the VM
vm_add_nic --- Create and Add a nic to the VM
vm_as_template --- Save a VirtualMachine as template
vm_attach_cdrom --- Attach a CDROM to the VM
vm_attach_shareddisk --- Attach a Shared Virtual Disk to the VM
vm_clone --- Clone a VirtualMachine
vm_config --- Config a VirtualMachine
vm_create --- Create a VM
vm_del --- Delete a VirtualMachine
vm_del_disk --- Remove a disk from the VM
vm_del_nic --- Remove a nic from the VM
vm_deploy --- Deploy a VirtualMachine
vm_detach_cdrom --- Detach CDROMs from the VM
vm_detach_shareddisk --- Detach a Shared Virtual Disk from the VM
vm_info --- Get a VM info
vm_list --- Get a list of VMs
vm_list_cdrom --- List CDROMs of the VM
vm_list_disk --- List Disks of the VM
vm_list_nic --- List Virtual Network Interfaces of the VM
vm_migrate --- Live Migration
vm_migrate_all --- Migrate all the VMs on the server
vm_pause --- Pause a VirtualMachine
vm_poweroff --- Poweroff a VirtualMachine
vm_poweron --- PowerOn a VirtualMachine
vm_reboot --- Restart a VirtualMachine
vm_reset_status --- Reset status of a VirtualMachine
vm_resume --- Resume a VirtualMachine
vm_set_bootdevice --- Set the first BootDevice
vm_set_keyboardlayout --- Set the Keyboard Layout
vm_set_vnc_pwd --- Set the VNC Console Password
vm_status --- Get a VM status
vm_suspend --- Suspend a VirtualMachine
vm_unpause --- Unpause a VirtualMachine
vncviewer --- Start a VNC console.
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