Coming Soon: OracleWorld 2015 for Remote Management

[San Francisco California, courtesy Oracle Corporation]

Coming Soon: OpenWorld 2015 (for Remote Management)

The place to be will be Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, California during October 25-29.OpenWorld will offer many seminars to attend, but there is also JavaOne! Register & Fly to one of the most anticipated conferences of 2015. Why is this so anticipated?

Seminars & Sessions

There are a variety of seminars, conferences, and hands-on lab activities for just about everything imaginable. For people who are involved in Network, Systems, Database, and Application Management - the most applicable items are listed below. If you find some of these interesting, then you don't want to miss it!

For the Network, Operating System, Database, and Application Management staff:

Way Beyond the Basics: Oracle Enterprise Manager Monitoring Best Practices [CON9721]

Ana Maria Mccollum, Director of Product Management, Oracle

Oracle Enterprise Manager monitoring plays a critical role in enabling IT to provide highly available services to its business. As enterprises optimize their monitoring processes and evolve to adopt Oracle Cloud Platform services, Oracle Enterprise Manager continues to meet these new requirements with significant planned enhancements in monitoring. These include enhancements to metric extensions, adaptive thresholds, user-defined target properties, and corrective actions as well as new capabilities such as the incident manager dashboard, auto event grouping, the export/import of rule sets, and brownouts for planned/unplanned outages. In addition to new features, this session reviews best practices for implementing an effective and scalable monitoring solution.

Conference Session

Oracle Enterprise Manager: One Manager to Rule Them All - Ops Center and Oracle VM Manager.

Upgrading Oracle Enterprise Manager: Why and How [CON9729]

Akanksha Sheoran Kaler, Principal Product Manager, Oracle

The upcoming release of Oracle Enterprise Manager brings, for the first time, a converged management for Oracle hardware and software. It also includes exciting new enhancements to uninterrupted monitoring, hybrid cloud management, and engineered systems management that make the upgrade worth it. This session outlines the new capabilities and provides best practices to seamlessly upgrade your existing environment to the upcoming release of Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Conference Session

Do you use Oracle Middleware? Oracle offers Middleware as a Service with Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Realizing MWaaS on the Private Cloud Using Oracle Enterprise Manager [CON4627]

David Nims, UNIX Platform Architect, Fiserv

Umesh Panwar, Sr. Platform Engineer, Fiserv

Wojciech Serafin, Oracle

Provisioning a large number of middleware assets across multiple environments in a homogeneous way could be a challenging task for the IT organization. Enterprises are looking for an automated process for provisioning these assets within their data center and managing all application lifecycle management tasks using prebuilt flows. This session discusses how Fiserv, a worldwide provider of financial services technology, leveraged Oracle Enterprise Manager to provision and manage more than 500 middleware domains. The solution provided enterprise capabilities for automated, fast, simple, flexible, and reliable deployments based on the Oracle Enterprise Deployment Guide and significantly reduced time to market to provision new applications on its private cloud.

Conference Session

Security for Network Management on your mind? Oracle Solaris 11 with Security Auditing Framework.

Assessing, Reporting, and Customizing the Security Compliance in Oracle Solaris 11.2 [HOL4645]

Qianqian Chen, Oracle

Ling-yun Li, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle

Richard Liu, Senior Software Engineer, Oracle

Report Compliance is one of the new security features introduced in Oracle Solaris 11.2 that provides a framework for assessing and reporting the compliance of an Oracle Solaris system to a given security benchmark. In this lab, learn how to install the Report Compliance tool, run an assessment on the hosting Oracle Solaris against the Oracle Solaris baseline benchmark, generate an HTML report for review, and rerun the assessment after a quick remediation. And last, learn how to customize the benchmark by adding a user-defined check. After this lab, you will understand what Report Compliance is and how to use it to audit the security compliance of an Oracle Solaris system, and have an overall idea of how to customize a benchmark in case of need.

HOL (Hands-on Lab) Session

Use Java for Network & Systems Management (NSM)? Optimize using Solaris 11 with DTrace.

Uncover JDK 8 Secrets Using DTrace on Oracle Solaris 11 [HOL6427]

Gary Wang, Manager, Oracle

Yu Wang, Software Engineer, Oracle

Xiao-song Zhu, Principal Software Engineer, Oracle

JDK 8 is the most innovative version of Java ever. It brings many new features to the Java platform, such as Lambda Expressions, Streams, and Functional Interfaces. For the programmers, these features are easy to use; however, it is hard to understand their internal mechanisms. In this lab, learn how to use the Oracle Solaris 11 DTrace feature to find out how a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) implements these new features, including Streams Pipeline, Lambda Parallelism, Lazy Evaluation, and Recursion Optimizing.

HOL (Hands-on Lab) Session

How big can you make your Java based NSM? Scaling success stories by other applications.

Scaling to 1,000,000 Concurrent Users on the JVM [CON7220]

Jo Voordeckers, Senior Software Engineer, Livefyre

Livefyre built a platform that powers real-time comments and curated social media for some of the largest websites, such as CNN, Fox, Sky, CBS, Coca-Cola, HBO, CNET, Universal Music Group, and Break. On average it deals with one million concurrent users on its systems. Java EE will get you a long way, but with these numbers, the company needed to resort to some often-overlooked computer science tricks and techniques to scale its microservices architecture to handle as many as 100,000 active concurrent connections per JVM. This session covers some of the data structures, patterns, best practices, and datastores that Livefyre uses to make this all happen and keep it running. If you’re in a company with growing scalability pains, this session is for you.

Conference Session

Got Engineered Systems? Take care of them.

Monitor Engineered Systems from a Single Pane of Glass: Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c [UGF10288]

Alfredo Krieg, Sr. Oracle Enterprise Cloud Administrator, The Sherwin Williams Company

Oracle Enterprise Manger 12c provides comprehensive and centralized monitoring capabilities for Oracle engineered systems including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine. This presentation outlines the steps required to discover and monitor Oracle engineered systems, as well as the challenges faced and the benefits of using Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c to provide Oracle Exadata health-check reports.

User Group Forum Session

Got Databases? Best practices for managing hundreds or thousands.

How to Upgrade Hundreds or Thousands of Databases in a Reasonable Amount of Time [CON8375]

Mike Dietrich, Master Product Manager, Oracle

Roy Swonger, Sr Director, Software Development, Oracle

Many customers now have database environments numbering in the hundreds or even thousands. This session addresses the challenge of maintaining technical currency of such an environment while also containing upgrade and migration costs at a reasonable level. Learn from Oracle Database upgrade experts about product features, options, tools, techniques, and services that can help you maintain control of your database environment. You will also see examples of how real customers are successfully meeting this challenge today.

Conference Session

Network & Systems Management: The Future of Oracle Enterprise Manager.

The Future of Oracle Enterprise Manager: What’s Next? [CON9708]

Sudip Datta, Vice President of Product Management, Oracle

Oracle has been hard at work on the next major release of Oracle Enterprise Manager, and in this session the speakers are excited to give you a sneak preview of what’s coming. Learn about top new features including Integrated Hardware Management and Federated Enterprise Manager, upcoming Oracle Cloud integrations, and improvements across private cloud and stack management capabilities. Join this session for a glimpse of the future of Oracle’s on-premises private and hybrid cloud management capabilities.

Conference Session

Network & Systems Management: Best Practices with High Availability for Oracle Enterprise Manager

Practical Tips for Oracle Enterprise Manager High Availability and Diagnostics [CON9726]

Angeline Dhanarani, Senior Product Manager, Oracle

Many data centers have come to rely on Oracle Enterprise Manager as their management tool for mission-critical Oracle infrastructure and applications. As such, it is critical to ensure that the Oracle Enterprise Manager deployment is highly available and secure and performs optimally. This session shares best practices for managing an Oracle Enterprise Manager deployment with reduced effort while still ensuring that objectives are met. Strategies include configuring highly available deployments, migrating to a replication-based disaster recovery solution, deploying across networks using a new multiproxy server feature, monitoring and diagnostics of critical subsystems, and securing the Oracle Enterprise Manager infrastructure.

Conference Session

Network & Systems Management: From hundreds to hundreds of thousands of assets using OEM.

Scaling the Limits of the Cloud with the New Oracle Enterprise Manager [CON9731]

Mithun Shankar, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle

The cloud is BIG. The cloud is VAST. With cloud computing, the scale of IT has changed from a few hundred assets to hundreds of thousands of assets. This necessitates a newly engineered monitoring, automation, and reporting framework that is nimble, scalable, and real time. The new release of Oracle Enterprise Manager introduces real-time monitoring, a scalable job system that can integrate with the industry’s leading automation frameworks like Chef, and a comprehensive reporting infrastructure. This session covers these new enhancements along with anecdotal experiences from Oracle’s own cloud operations.

Conference Session

Building your own embedded Network Management probe in Java?

Zero to Deploy: Getting Started with Java ME Embedded [TUT5599]

Alexander Belokrylov, Principal Product Manager, Oracle

This how-to session demonstrates a develop/build/deploy/debug/execute cycle set from scratch. It is based on Java ME Embedded in combination with various boards, such as the Raspberry Pi, the Freescale K64, and a device emulator. The session includes guidelines and tips on installing the Java ME Embedded SDK and runtime. It also touches on the key aspects of application development and troubleshooting in a simple demo that involves the basic concepts of working with various I/O devices.

Tutorial

Oracle Enterprise Manager: Provisioning Databases, without DBA'

Private Cloud Provisioning Using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c [UGF9959]

Gustavo Rene Antunez, DBA Team Lead, Pythian

With the newest version of Oracle Database 12c and its multitenant option, we are moving toward an era of provisioning databases to our clients faster than we ever could, even leaving out the DBA and allowing the developers and project leads to provision themselves the database that they need. This presentation guides you through the different ways you can provision data from one Oracle Database to another using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c.

User Group Forum Session

Oracle Enterprise Manager: Database as a Service

PDBaaS: Oracle Database 12c, Multitenant, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c [CON4628]

Krishna Kapa, Pepsico

Malla Santosh, Manager, GCSI, EM Foundation, Oracle

Database as a service (DBaaS) offers organizations accelerated deployment, elastic capacity, greater consolidation efficiency, higher availability, and lower overall operational cost and complexity. Oracle Database 12c provides an innovative multitenant architecture featuring pluggable databases that make it easy to offer DBaaS and consolidate databases in the clouds. This session showcases the implementation of pluggable database as a service (PDBaaS) using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c and the benefits of consolidating databases into the Oracle Database 12c multitenant architecture, rapid provisioning of pluggable databases using the self-service portal, and maintenance of the pluggable databases.

Conference Session

Oracle Enterprise Manager OpsCenter, My Oracle Support, Maintenance, Upgrades, Patching.

Best Practices for Oracle Solaris Maintenance and Upgrades [CON8705]

David Buxton, Principal Technical Support Engineer, Oracle

Raphy Pallikunnath, Manager, Solaris & Network Technology Service Center, Oracle

Unleash the potential of Oracle Solaris, with an insight into technical resources and proactive support tools. This session looks at best practices for maintaining and upgrading Oracle Solaris. See how to leverage the My Oracle Support portal for both reactive and proactive issues, along with how the My Oracle Support Community can put you in touch with a wealth of knowledge. Enjoy a voyage of discovery to see the benefits and possibilities of using Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center features to help maintain and support your data center assets.

Conference Session

Oracle Enterprise Manager: Managing MySQL

Oracle Enterprise Manager for MySQL Database—Latest Features [CON4507]

Carlos Proal Aguilar, Senior Software Developer, Oracle

This session provides an overview of how to use the latest Oracle Enterprise Manager plugin release for MySQL Database to monitor database connections, index usage, replication status, compliance scores, and other key configuration and performance metrics.

Conference Session

Oracle Enterprise Manager: Hands-On for MySQL

Practical Overview of the Latest Features of Oracle Enterprise Manager for MySQL [HOL4522]

Carlos Proal Aguilar, Senior Software Developer, Oracle

In this hands-on lab, participants install and use the Oracle Enterprise Manager plugin release for MySQL to monitor database connections, index usage, replication status, compliance scores, and other key configuration and performance metrics.

HOL (Hands-on Lab) Session

Oracle Enterprise Manager: Monitoring Exadata

Oracle Exadata Monitoring and Management Best Practices [CON9727]

Ashish Agrawal, Group Product Manager, Oracle

Oracle Enterprise Manager uses a holistic approach to manage Oracle Exadata Database Machine, providing comprehensive performance and lifecycle management from testing and deployment to proactive monitoring and ongoing maintenance across the entire engineered system. In this session, hear about new capabilities in the upcoming Oracle Enterprise Manager plugin for Oracle Exadata that includes Oracle Exadata virtualization provisioning and monitoring, the ability to monitor the latest Oracle Exadata hardware, Exacheck (ORAchk), Exadata Sparse Cloning, and the Automatic Service Request capability for Oracle Exadata hardware targets in Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Conference Session

Software Defined Networks with Security and The Cloud

Network and Security Function with Oracle SDN Virtual Network Services [HOL10372]

With cloud data center architectures requiring agility and flexibility in deploying on-demand network services, the traditional approach with purpose-built physical network appliances does not meet the requirements. The Virtual Network Services feature of Oracle SDN (Software Defined Networking) provides the ability to deploy on-demand network services such as firewall, router, load balancer, virtual private network (VPN), and network address translation (NAT) in a single virtual appliance, eliminating the need for proprietary fixed function devices. With centralized management, secure multitenancy, and on-demand provisioning, this allows cloud-enabled data centers to be agile and elastic.

HOL (Hands-on Lab) Session

Monitoring Oracle Exadata Platforms

Get Under the Hood with Oracle Exadata Monitoring [CON10169]

Farouk Abushaban, Senior Principal Technical Analyst, Oracle

In this session, learn how to quickly set up complete monitoring for your Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Our subject matter expert and global technical lead in Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Exadata support shares knowledge gained from working with customer deployments worldwide. Specific topics covered include common challenges, best practices, and new features to get your complete Oracle Exadata Database Machine stack monitored using Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control.

Conference Session

Oracle Enterprise Manager Demonstrations and Features

Oracle Enterprise Manager: The Complete Solution and Oracle’s Best-Kept Secrets [CON9715]

Amit Ganesh, Vice President Enterprise Manager, Oracle

Come to this informative session to learn about the breadth of capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager from the head of Oracle Enterprise Manager Product Development. Through a series of product demonstrations, you’ll gain exposure to some of the most powerful features in the Oracle Enterprise Manager product family and see how they work together as a solution. Learn how to get the most out of the features you already use every day as well as how to leverage features you might not yet know about. Finally, receive expert guidance on how to maximize your Oracle OpenWorld experience to understand all that Oracle Enterprise Manager has to offer.

Conference Session

Maintaining and Supporting Oracle Enterprise Manager

Best Practices for Maintaining and Supporting Oracle Enterprise Manager [CON8671]

Rachel Bridden, Principal Technical Support Engineer, Oracle

Marilyn Roncati, Director of Lifecycle Management, Oracle

In this session, learn about best practices, tips, and tools for maintaining and getting the most out of Oracle Enterprise Manager. Experts from Oracle Support offer knowledge gained from working with Oracle customers worldwide. They look at patching, upgrades, issue resolution, and more. Specific topics covered include Oracle Enterprise Manager metrics and health checks, remote diagnostics, communities, and how to receive priority service request handling.

Conference Session

Managing Security with Oracle Enterprise Manager

Raising the Ante on Security with Oracle Enterprise Manager [CON9719]

Angeline Dhanarani, Senior Product Manager, Oracle

Ana Maria Mccollum, Director of Product Management, Oracle

In today’s highly connected world, security is a critical area of concern for both IT and the business. Security teams demand compliance with security best practices and corporate security standards. In this session, learn practical strategies to help you adhere to these standards using Oracle Enterprise Manager. Topics include external authentication, authorization, user management, public and private roles, managing passwords, privilege delegation providers, and secure communications, with a focus on key upcoming Oracle Enterprise Manager enhancements, such as managing DBSNMP accounts, new privileges to manage users, new fine-grained database access privileges, and Transport Layer Security-based communications between Oracle Enterprise Manager components.

Conference Session

Automating Solaris Management with Puppet

Automating Oracle Solaris Administration with Puppet [HOL10359]

Geoffrey Gardella, Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, Oracle

Cindy Swearingen, Senior Product Manager, Oracle

Oracle Solaris 11 integrates Puppet, a configuration management solution that you can use to automate Oracle Solaris administration tasks. In this lab session, learn how to use Puppet to automate Oracle Solaris lifecycle management tasks.

HOL (Hands-on Lab) Session

Solaris 10: SNMP Agent Hints

Trying to enable SNMP under Solaris 10?

A few important things to know:

Adjust your community strings and manager parameters:

sun9999/admin$ ls -al /etc/sma/snmp/snmpd.conf /etc/snmp/conf/snmpd.conf
-rw------- 1 root bin 3300 Feb 11 03:32 /etc/sma/snmp/snmpd.conf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root nsm 2221 Mar 17 2009 /etc/snmp/conf/snmpd.conf

Ensure your service is online:

sun9999/admin$ svcs snmpdx
STATE STIME FMRI
online May_21 svc:/application/management/snmpdx:default

Ensure your daemons are running:

sun9999/admin$ ps -elf | grep snmp
0 S root 1330 1 0 40 20 ? 370 ? May 21 ? 0:04 /usr/lib/snmp/snmpdx -y -c /etc/snm
0 S root 1322 1 0 40 20 ? 1290 ? May 21 ? 6:01 /usr/sfw/sbin/snmpd

A New Tablet on the Horizon?

A New Tablet on the Horizon?

Mac Tablet Rumors

There has been grumbling about Apple Macintosh "tablet" form factors for years, although the leaks have been getting more substantial as of late.

One such published rumor included a quote, from an enthusiast, which was highly criticized:
"The iTouch Tablet is about to change society as we know it."

This comment really all depends upon the execution by Apple.

Background to Successful Appliance Launches

What made the iPod, iPod Touch and iPhone successful?

Apple figured out how to change the industries in three markets: portable music players, PDA's, and Cell Phones. As a side note, Apple failed to create the PDA market with the Newton.

If Apple applies the same consideration into the Tablet market, they could do well.

Moving onto the Tablet

Making a successful consumer oriented appliance technology in a tablet which is easily manageable could be the key. Without the need for OS patches & upgrades in conjunction with virus updates, many traditional market outlets could choose the device over a portable PC or laptop:

• home theater entertainment
• eBook reading appliances
• libraries
• conference centers
• church pulpits
• university professors
• university students
• audio mixing consoles
• video special effects generators
• lighting control panels

Anyone who has used cheaply manufactured devices (made with little attention to software & hardware details) tire of the experience quickly (due to the issues inherent with trash design & manufacturing.) A large number of good ideas go to the technical graveyard when consumers believe they are poorly implemented the first time around. An Apple "iTablet" with the engineering of a Apple MacBook Air might be accepted rapidly.


Anyone who has used industrial devices, which have physical controls, spend a pretty penny for them - moving the technology to touch screen controls could result in a far better user experience and longevity in the device usage without substantial maintenance in cleaning sliders/pots.

If Apple does a tablet right, they could really revolutionize many industries.

Network Management

What does all of this have to do with Network Management?

• Network Management uses obtuse interfaces from a variety of vendors.
  
• The features from multiple vendors use significantly different interfaces, some of which provide poor user interface capabilities, and all are generally very expensive to implement on a per-user basis.
• People are becoming familiar with many "Web 2.0" features in every day life and these are not being backfilled into the Network Management arena by vendors.
• People are demanding more mobility and many Network Management vendors are not delivering these features by investing in a time of low revenue in an global economic recession.
  

How could these issues be resolved in a tablet?

• Remote Control capabilities (such as RDP, VNC, Telnet) are all available & widely distributed today in the iPod Touch and iPhone via Apple iTunes today, at a very reasonable cost (per user.)
• Remote debugging capabilities (such as Ping, Traceroute) are available & widely distributed today in the iPhone Touch and iPhone via Apple iTunes today, at a very reasonable cost (per user.)
• Corporations are already leveraging portables such as iPod Touch and iPhone via Microsoft Exchange support for corporate applications.
• VPN capabilities are built into remote devices like the iPhone today for remote capabilities.
  
• Using a standard interface, imposed by the iPod Touch or iPhone API's for multiple existing Web 2.0 applications, help users reduce barriers to entry through simplification, and would reduce training requirements for existing Network Management applications due to obtuse user interfaces by the vendors.
• Using a standard interface, imposed by the iPod Touch or iPhone API's for multiple existing Web 2.0 applications, would allow greater cross-vendor integration, since the platform would become the integration location.
• User interaction with Network Management maps and displays often use mouse clicks and drags, while API's in the iPod Touch and iPhone offer much more intuitive interactions such as dragging your finger or pinch.
• API integration of Google Maps into iPod Touch or iPhone with Location would reduce the burden of development on Network Management user interfaces - providing sophisticated geographical maps to the application provider without needing to create & license bloat-ware.
• API integration of Google Maps into iPod Touch or iPhone with Location would reduce the burden of use with Network Management user interfaces - providing a unified look-and-feel to what users expect in typical mapping applications while on foot or in their car
• People are already familiar with standard notification technology with their home computers through Web 2.0 interfaces and the mobile equivalents (through devices such as the Apple iPod Touch and Apple iPhone) - so the building of new notification technology filters by vendors becomes irrelevant, allowing users to use interfaces comfortable to them, while being productive more quickly when starting to use the standard interfaces
  
• The cost of a Apple "iTablet" hardware (or whatever it will be called) would be far less than the licensing per-user that is typically paid to a vendor on a per-seat charge, if standard interfaces could be developed to Web 2.0 environment.
• Not knowing what managed vendor equipment looks like is something that could be a thing of the past when leveraging software suite built into the Apple iPhone or iPod Touch - with the ability to have integrated photo library that sync's with a central database, a library could be kept up-to-date on all remote devices very easily, since the software management is built in.
  

Closing Thoughts

Will Apple release a tablet?

This is a great unknown, but all being said, moving Network Management applications to devices like the Apple iPod Touch and iPhone is a no-brainer.

A larger form factor in an appliance (that is not an Apple laptop) could easily infiltrate the Network Management business, especially if it can demonstrate cost savings during dire economic times.