Oracle Self-Service Kit : Provisioning Oracle Database components using the System Center stack

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With the recent announcements from Oracle and Microsoft, many of you are getting in touch with us to understand how you can deploy and manage Oracle workloads on Hyper-V.

This post is the opportunity to highlight one of the items we have on that front, called the “Oracle Self-Service Kit”.

A picture being worth a thousands words, this solution helps you achieve the following process, fully automated with System Center:

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Now, this is actually only one of the 4 deployment use cases being handled by this solution. This post will be an overview of what the “Oracle Self-Service Kit” contains and what you can achieve with it, with deeper dive posts also available.

Oh, and did we mention this solution is actually available as a downloadable package? Smile

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Make sure you go through the 2 deep-dive posts, including “Gimme the details (part 2)”, which covers the installation and configuration instructions for this sample solution.

You can also watch an overview video with a demonstration, in this post.

 

What do you get, and how is each deployment type handled?

The package you will download includes different components:

At the fabric level, 15 Orchestrator Runbooks cover 4 different deployment scenarios on Windows Server on premise:

“Server” scenarios
  • (1) Deploying a new standalone virtual machine with database software only, as part of an “Oracle virtual farm”
  • Under the hood, Orchestrator leverages a VMM service template. A “farm” of Oracle Database 12c instances is created if it does not exist yet, otherwise it is scaled out.
“Database” scenarios
  • Deploying a new (2) database or (3) schema on an existing “shared” infrastructure of Oracle Database 12c servers
  • (4) Deploying a new database on a new dedicated Oracle server
  • Under the hood, Orchestrator leverages Oracle Database 12c unattended installs and PowerShell commands, to create a database/schema on an existing or new virtual machine

At the process level, an optional Service Manager management pack showcases self-service, a configurable approval process, and automatic user discovery for notifications.

You can choose to just use the fabric components (Runbooks and service template), and integrate them with your own self-service. The Service Manager integration has been crafted so that it has no hard dependencies : Should you wish to use them, the SM-enabled Runbooks monitor service requests of a specific type and in a specific condition, update these requests and/or call Orchestrator Runbooks. You can read more details on what the SM integration adds into the solution, in the second deep dive post.

 

Overall flow

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Service Manager Requests Offerings Orchestrator Runbooks VMM Service Template

 

I want to learn more!

Fear not! Here are two additional posts going over more details regarding the Oracle Self-Service Kit:

  • Gimme the details (part 1)

    • Sample execution #1 : Requesting a new dedicated Oracle database
    • Sample execution #2 : Requesting a new schema on a shared environment

  • Gimme the details (part 2)

    • More details on the Runbooks
    • What’s in the VMM Service Template?
    • What do I get if I use the Service Manager integration?
    • Using the package : Installation and configuration

Supported versions

These deployment scenarios were tested with Oracle Database 12c running on Windows Server 2012.

System Center 2012 SP1 was used, including the Orchestrator, Virtual Machine Manager and Service Manager components.

 

Wrap-up / Looking ahead

Feel free to share your experience using this sample solution!

This is an ongoing effort and we plan to update the solution to cover additional scenarios, including support for Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) 12c support, support for Systm Center 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and for added best practices/features from Oracle Database 12c. Be sure to check back with us !