[Puppet Users] Re: Puppet vs Oracle Enterprise Manager (cm pack)?

Byron Miller
Wed, 02 Oct 2013 15:50:34 -0000

Doug,

For the most part, Oracle sells 12c cloud control as an enterprise
dashboard with provisioning and metering capabilities.  12c provisions
using templates and scripts and then has some patching stuff built on that
for its oracle products and some os''s.  It''s not an idempotent
based system
by design - not a desired state config - more of a reporting config and
here is how to bill for it.  It makes people happy who want to share costs
since oracle costs so much to begin with :)

While oracle can provision oracle vm''s and oracle systems and oracle is
moving to pluggable databases to further remove themselves from the OS,
there is value in 12c for oracle shops. It''s just a big cost and a big
price you pay to play that game.

We don''t use the oracle provisioning, oracle vm. We''re a
vmware shop, so i
provision everything from the OS up to apps through puppet & the foreman
and i use puppet to deploy an RPM based 12c agent on hosts in the oracle
groups.  The oracle agent just does its thing for our management and
performance packs and allows us to easily manage / alert on oracle metrics,
processes, jobs and events.

For what isn''t oracle related, we don''t install the oracle
cloud control
agents - we use Nagios..

We weren''t using puppet to help do metered billing or to focus on
provision
oracle stacks only so we didn''t buy the provisioning or cloud
management
packs, but we do enjoy it for the oracle rdbms / weblogic
monitoring/reporting/alerting



On Monday, September 30, 2013 6:50:24 PM UTC-5, dkoleary
wrote:
>
> Hey;
>
> >>We use both as they solve different problems.
>
> Thank you very much for responding!  All of the searching I''ve
been doing
> has slowly lead me to that same conclusion, but I don''t have any
solid
> facts or sites to back it up.
>
> My client also has a lot of oracle stuff.  I''m sure they could
start using
> rhel w/o issue, but it''s almost exclusively OEL at this point.
They say
> they have the license for OEM 12c; but, so far, I''ve not been able
to
> confirm the license for the CM pack - which, if I''m reading it
right, is
> *not* cheap and does not come with the base OEM.
>
> I''ve read about the mcollective but haven''t had a chance
to try it yet.
>  Good to know that there''s a performance issue running both of
puppet and
> OEM simultaneously.
>
> As for the environment: as I mentioned, it''s mostly OEL but they
do have a
> smattering of rhel ver 4 and 5.  Most of the systems are now vmware guests;
> but, there are a few physicals - mostly the rhel4 systems, still running.
>
> >>What are you trying to solve?
>
> That, right there, is my core problem.  I haven''t yet been able to
hammer
> that down; but, I believe that the other admin (the one pushing for OEM)
> and I are trying to solve different problems.  She''s looking for
something
> that''ll automate patching + some other nebulous things on which I
haven''t
> gotten a clear answer.  I''m looking for a tool through which I can
nail
> down system configurations - ensuring that they''re kept consistent
across
> all environments - and help automate configuration change distributions.
>  I''m a UNIX admin but also a security guy at heart (CISSP/CISA).
>
> So, short version: I need to figure out what my client''s trying to
solve
> (not as easy an investigation as one would hope) and, from there, I can
> figure out whether or not OEM will be sufficient.
>
> At your convenience, any chance you could expand on the concept that they
> solve different problems?
>
> Thanks again, very much, for your response.  It''s nice getting at
least a
> partial confirmation that what I was suspecting is accurate.
>
> Doug O"Leary
>