Oracle Db10g Configuration

8/8/2019 Oracle Db10g Configuration

1/9

ORACLE DATA SHEET

February 2007 1

ORACLE ENTERPRISE MANAGER 10 g CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT PACK FORORACLE DATABASE

CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT PACKFEATURES

Automated discovery ofdependency relationshipsbetween services, systemsand Oracle and non-Oracletechnology components

Centralized inventory in theEM CMDB

Powerful ad-hoc search andcompare features

Extensible configurationschema

Historical change tracking Critical Patch Advisory Over 200 best practice

polices covering security,configuration and storage

Facilitates compliance withregulatory standards likeITIL and Cobit

The Enterprise Manager Configuration Management Pack forms the centerp

Enterprise Managers ability to manage configurations and automate IT proce

captures and centralizes the information about all hardware and software reso

the enterprise, thereby facilitating the diagnosis of problems, automation of pro

compliance with regulatory and industry standards like Sarbanes-Oxley and

The proactive evaluation of configuration against best practices, aided by com

reporting and powerful analytics, ensure a more efficient use of IT resourc

problem resolution and an improved Quality Of Service.

Key Benefits

Manage complex software configurations

Provides a real-time or near-real-time view of configuration items,services and their dependencies within and across each other.Manage configuration drift through comparison with goldconfigurations and saved baselines. Enables the tracking, analysisand reporting on configurations while capturing configuration datathat is used for the administration of the entire change managementprocess, including change automation and active system diagnostics

Facilitates compliance to ITIL processes:

Configuration Management is the foundation to all Service Supportprocesses, enabling effective incident management, problemmanagement, change management, release management, service levelmanagement and availability management.

Faster problem resolution and root cause analysis:

Detects, documents, alerts and continuously maintains system

configuration shift and drift resulting from planned and unplannedevents. Reduces the risks involved in rolling out changes toproduction environments by identifying the impact of changes ondeployed applications and users. Enable faster mean-time-to-repairthrough root cause analysis by isolating and correlating problems tothe exact infrastructure or application component that is causing failure and by auditing change history for all targets and parameters.

Provides demonstrable control over the IT environment for IT governance and compliance


2/9

ORACLE DATA SHEET

February 2007 2

The key features of the pack are described below.

Automated Inventory and Configuration Baselining

The Oracle Configuration Management Pack collects deep configuration

information about hardware and software components across theenterprise. This information includes

Hardware (CPU, memory, storage, network etc) Operating system packages, patches and kernel parameter

settings Oracle software (operating system, database, middleware and

applications) installed including interim patches, patch sets andother configuration settings, components, DB init parameters

Systems, Service and Groups

Topologies Third party software that include, among others, databases like

SQL Server and DB2, storage like NetApp and EMC,networking solutions like Juniper and Cisco and middleware likeBEA Weblogic and IBM WebSphere

The configuration is automatically collected at regular intervals and storedin the Enterprise Manager CMDB. Ad-hoc collections is also supportedand the configuration can be saved as a baseline for configurationcomparison

The Client System Analyzer (CSA) functionality collects and analyzes data

from windows client machines, such as desktops or laptops. Using anagentless technology, client data such as hardware and OS version andconfiguration, software versions, network latency can be uploaded andthen compared against reference configurations to verify if the client isconfigured as desired.

Centralized inventory tracking

For years, IT departments have relied upon the knowledge of key

individuals who kept track of all the software and hardware assets indocuments and spreadsheets. As businesses expand or get morecomplicated such manual methods are no longer viable from a quality of service standpoint and a centralized tool to track the assets becomesimperative.

Enterprise Manager offers a comprehensive view of all heterogeneouscomponents in a data center from a central console. For example, thesnapshot below shows a view of all Oracle database installations in anenterprise.


3/9

ORACLE DATA SHEET

February 2007 3

Figure 1: Deployment Summary view of Oracle Database installations

Ad-hoc Search and Analysis

Enterprise Manager possesses the ability to search for specificconfiguration values across all the targets to verify drift from a goldstandard. This can help in finding out if problem configurations are inuse. Some out-of-box searches can find out:

Which servers have a particular version of a product installed

Which Oracle installations are missing a particular patch or apatch set

Which Oracle databases have a particular init.ora parameter set Which Oracle databases are using a particular feature, say,

Partitioning Which hosts have a specific kernel parameter value set Which hosts have a specific operating system patch installed

The Enterprise Manager schema definition is published and is extensibleto accommodate custom search and reporting.

Configuration Comparison

Enterprise Manager also provides tools for comparing systems enterprise- wide at great detail, allowing an administrator to quickly and easilypinpoint any potential differences. The comparison spans the entire stack from the hardware to the application. This helps to keep systemssynchronized and reduces "configuration drift". It also simplifies


4/9

ORACLE DATA SHEET

February 2007 4

investigations into why systems that are presumed to be identical may behave differently, for example the nodes in a RAC cluster.

Administrators often need to create new systems that are equivalent inperformance to existing systems. One way to do this is to capture point intime information for an existing system. This information can then beused as a blueprint for creation of new systems. The Oracle ConfigurationManagement Pack allows users to easily capture, store and view suchinformation.

Configuration comparison is extremely useful in change management. By comparing configuration baselines, before and after a change or patch isapplied, one can verify that all configuration changes introduced as resultof the patch were planned and expected.

The ad hoc or scheduled comparison between selected multiple (1-n)targets and gold configuration can be against reference configuration, asaved configuration baseline or a live configuration. Comparison results

can be saved to a file for further analysis.

Figure 2: Comparison of Oracle Database SGA parameters between twodatabase instances

Configuration History and Tracking

Administrators are faced with situations where a system that once worked well is suddenly not performing at an acceptable level. Did someone makea change to a configuration parameter? Apply an operating system patch?Remove memory? Trying to determine the exact change responsible forthe decrease in system performance could take hours if the administratorhad to go through each of the possible scenarios by hand. EnterpriseManager makes it simple by tracking all changes to hardware and software


5/9

ORACLE DATA SHEET

February 2007 5

installations and configurations. This makes it quick and easy for theadministrator to view changes that have been made since the last time themachine was functioning appropriately, and apply the appropriate solutionto get the system back up to an acceptable level. This feature is critical inmanaging compliance, since it facilitates who changed, what, when and

why analysis.

Out of box best practices Policies

Enterprise Manager 10 g Release 2 ships with more than 220 bestpractices policies in the areas of security, configuration, and storage.Policies help in continuous security assessment by automated detection of critical security vulnerabilities. Policies are effective in managingconfiguration drift (through installation of patches, adding files and

directories, changing settings and ports, editing its dependencies, etc) by continually auditing against prescribed configurations. This drift istracked so that administrators know when they are happening, whatchanges are acceptable, and what changes must be corrected. This levelof security and compliance, through proactive auditing and enforcement,is necessary to keep control in the continual flux that defines most of todays data centers. Policies can be scheduled and applied across targets.Example policies include:

Database SPFILE not used Default passwords that are unchanged

Insufficient number of Control Files Detect open host ports

Enterprise Manager tracks violations of these policies in a similar manneras performance metrics. Notification rules can be applied and correctiveactions can be assigned. For example, if well-known username/passwordsare present in a database, a corrective action could be defined toautomatically disable that account.

Such proactive enforcement is supplemented with compliance reports thatdenote the compliance score for the targets over a period of time. It ispossible to inspect the compliance score and drill down at each target

level to detect the violations and the possible impact. Integration withproblem ticketing solutions allow for policy violation information to beautomatically sent without the need for manual intervention. Figure 2captures the rich out-of-box policy library while figure 3 shows thecompliance score over time for database best practice security policies.


6/9

ORACLE DATA SHEET

February 2007 6

Figure 3: Library of out-of-box policies

Compliance Dashboards and Policy Groups

Policy Group compliance dashboards enable administrators and CIOs toget at-a-glance view on how their systems are complying with security bestpractices specified in their environment. Increasing regulatory compliancedemands that IT systems are secure and have not been compromised.Ensuring that IT systems are behaving in-line with security best practicesis critical for any IT shop. Administrators define Policy Groups (acollection of security and configuration policies) against which eachselected target is evaluated. Policy Groups are Out of box bestpractices collections of policies for security, configuration managementand validated configurations can be mapped to industry standards like CISand Cobit.

The evaluation results are converted into compliance scores (based on a weighted average) and the overall scores can be presented in theCompliance Dashboard. The dashboard presents summaries of key indicators, with ability to drilldown to details, allowing users tocontinuously monitor and verify their compliance posture. Support fortrend analysis provides the ability to track progress towards complianceover time for the entire IT environment. Exceptions and violations can be

remediated to bring systems back into compliance with policy groups.Out-of-box policy groups include security best practices for database,RAC, and Oracle listener.


7/9

ORACLE DATA SHEET

February 2007 7

Figure 4: Secure Configuration for Oracle Database Policy Group

Critical Patch Advisory

The Critical Patch Advisory alerts users to critical patches issued byOracle and immediately identifies those systems across the enterprise thatmay require the new critical patch. The Critical Patch Advisory alsosupports an offline mode for data centers that lack direct connection tothe internet. The Critical Patch Advisory can automatically assess alltargets for violations, report deviations and offer multiple remediationpaths for fixing a particular vulnerability. It can then optionally invoke thepatch wizard to deploy the patch.

Figure 5: Critical patch Advisory for detecting security patch violations


8/9

ORACLE DATA SHEET

February 2007 8

Conclusion

The goal of the Configuration Management Pack is to reduce manuallabor, especially tedious and error prone tasks, in order to free up the

administrators for pro-active maintenance activities that will ultimately lead to a more stable and more efficient environment. Managing a datacenter requires automation for scalability and standardization. TheConfiguration Management Pack achieves these objectives by firstdiscovering the Oracle IT environment and then managing it throughchange tracking, search, comparison and lastly policy management. Policymanagement helps enforce best practices and in particular is theunderpinning of several security capabilities of Enterprise Manager thatlead to a more proactively secure environment, thus avoiding the highcosts associated with compromised security. The ConfigurationManagement Pack is a critical component of Oracle's grid management

solution. Used in conjunction with the other valuable managementcapabilities within Enterprise Manager Grid Control, Database Controland Application Server Control, administrators have the most powerfultoolset for managing the complete Oracle enterprise at the lowest cost.


9/9

ORACLE DATA SHEET

February 2007 9

Copyright 2007 Oracle. All Rights Reserved.

This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. Thisdocument is not warranted to be error-free, nor is it subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally orimplied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specificallydisclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by thisdocument. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for anypurpose, without our prior written permission.

Oracle, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may betrademarks of their respective owners.

Oracle Db10g Configuration

Documents

Transcript of Oracle Db10g Configuration