Monitoring & Troubleshooting Oracle Cloud at Customer

The prime advantage of cloud at customer is to deliver all cloud benefits at your data center. Oracle cloud at customer provides the same. When Oracle cloud at customer is chosen, it is Oracle who is responsible to install, configure and manage the software and hardware required to run Oracle cloud at customer. However, customers are responsible for monitoring and troubleshooting resources instantiate on Oracle cloud at customer.

Customers are required to understand the difference between system and user-space monitoring and the tools required. The Oracle cloud at customer subscription consists of the below components:

• Hardware and Software
• Control panel software
• The Oracle Advanced Support Gateway (OASW)
• The Oracle Cloud Service

System monitoring vs User Space Monitoring

Typically, Oracle cloud at customer is monitored at two level:

1. System
2. User space

Oracle monitors the system and the customer monitors the user space.

The systems or machine resources, such as : hardware, control panel and cloud services on Oracle cloud at Customer are managed by Oracle remotely using Oracle Advanced Gateway. The OAGW is only used and accessible to Oracle authorized personnel.

The user space components consists the below:

• Oracle Cloud accounts
• VMs instances on IaaS or PaaS
• DB that are provisioned within the PaaS subscription
• Applications (Oracle or any third-party)

Oracle manages the following hardware and software components:

• Ethernet switches
• Power Supplies
• Exadata Storage Servers
• Hypervisor running on the physical servers

Customers can assign administrators to manage cloud accounts. Customers also are free to use any external monitoring agents to monitor user-space components.

Why Oracle Cloud @ Customer is a good option?

One of the major concerns moving over cloud is the security for most of the organizations. Though cloud concept is around for quite sometime, still, a majority of customers are concerned about putting their data over cloud. To gain the confidence and at the same to take full advantage of Cloud technologies, various Cloud vendors started offering cloud at customer solutions. In this blog spot, am going to discuss about Oracle cloud at customer solutions, its advantages , subscription model etc.

Oracle Cloud at Customer delivers full advantages of cloud technologies at your data center. You subscribe hardware and software together when you go for cloud at customer option. Though Oracle does the initial setup, configuration and day-to-day system management, you still have all the advantages of security, network of your data center.

Typically, the cloud at customer option consist of the following:

• The hardware required to run Cloud at customer
• Control panel software
• The Oracle Advanced Support Gateway
• Oracle Cloud services

 As a customer, your responsibility involves managing cloud account and subscribed services. At any time, you can check your account balance and your current Oracle Cloud at Customer service usage. It is also possible that you can view your usage by region, by service, or by a specific time period.

To check your account balance and usage, Oracle recommends that you sign in to your Oracle Cloud Account in an Oracle data region. From there, you can view your overall account usage and Universal Credits balance. 

In nutshell, cloud at customer brings the cloud solutions to your data center, where you can apply all the rules of your data centre while taking the full advantages of cloud solutions.

Network design for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Assuming, you are planning to migrate your resources from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute classic environment to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, this blog post explains the details of network design for Cloud Infrastructure environment. It's important to understand and map the network design and details from both environments.

Cloud Inrastructure Compute Classic network has IP Networks and Shared Network model. On other hand, Cloud Infrastructure has Virtual Cloud Networks (VCNs) , Subnets, Availability Domain network model.

Before migration, you must map the network resources between the environments. Source -> Target:
Shared network -> VCN, IP Network -> IP Network, VPN -> IPSec VPN and Fast Connect classic -> FastConnect.

Consider creating below listed network elements in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure:

• VCN and Subnet CIDR Prefixes
• DNS Names 

Use the below procedure to configure cloud network for Cloud Infrastructure environment:

1. Create one or more VCNs.
2. Create an Internet gateway and/or NAT gateway. An Internet gateway is a virtual router that allows resources in a public subnet direct access the public Internet. A NAT gateway allows resources that don't have a public IP addresses to access the Internet, without exposing those resources to incoming traffic from the Internet.
3. Configure a service gateway, if required. A service gateway provides a path for private network traffic between your VCN and a public Oracle service such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage.
4. Create one or more subnets in each VCN.
5. Configure local peering gateways between VCNs, if required.
6. Configure security lists, security rules, and route tables for each subnet.

Migrating Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic Workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure - Migration Tools

If you are planning to migrate your resources from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle provides variety of tools to achieve this. In this blog post will discuss some of thetools which can be used to migrate Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic Workload resources to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. 

The tools below can be used to identify resources from Oracle cloud infrastructure Classic environments and to migrate to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy. Using these tools, one can setup required network, and migrate VMs and block storage volumes over the targeted systems.

Tools for migrating infrastructure resources : Compute, VMs and Block Storage

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic Discovery and Translation Tool: as the name explains, it is a discovery tool, which assist discovering the resources of different resources in your Cloud Infrastructure Classic environments, such as : compute Classic, Object Storage classic, load balancing classic account. Additionally, it is capable of reporting the items in the specified environment, list of VMs in the source environment and also networking information of the source system.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic VM and Block Storage Tool: This tool automates the process of migrating VMs and Block Storage over to the target environment. 
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic Block Volume Backup and Restore Tool: This tool used to migrate your remote snapshot of storage volumes as well as scheduled backups. 

Tools for migrating databases

To migrate databases to Oracle cloud infrastructure, you can use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Class Database Migration tool. This tool uses Oracle RMAN to create backup and restore the database over the targeted system.

Alternatively, Oracle Data Guard solution also can be used to migrate single or RAC databases to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Tools for migrating Object Storage

• rclone command is used to migrate your object storage data f you don't use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Storage Software Appliance.
• If Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Storage Software Appliance is used to store your object data, then you can migrate your data to your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage account by using the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Storage Gateway.

How to change Remote Trail Location at Source– Golden Gate 12c

There is a requirement to modify the remote trail location because of typo in the mount point. To change the remote trail location of the Golden Gate, first verify the extract trail information using the command below. 

GGSCI (hie-p-ggate) 48> INFO EXTTRAIL

       Extract Trail: /golgengate/ggs_home/dirdat/test/ru

        Seqno Length: 6

   Flip Seqno Length: yes

             Extract: DPMP1

               Seqno: 0

                 RBA: 0

           File Size: 500M

       Extract Trail: D:\app\oracle\product\ogg_1\lt

        Seqno Length: 6

   Flip Seqno Length: yes

             Extract: EXT1

               Seqno: 0

                 RBA: 0

           File Size: 100M

GGSCI (hie-p-ggate) 49>

First delete the current configuration of remote trail. 

GGSCI (hie-p-ggate) 50> delete rmttrail /golgengate/ggs_home/dirdat/test/ru, extract dpmp1

Deleting extract trail /golgengate/ggs_home/dirdat/test/ru for extract DPMP1

After removing, then add the remote trail again with the new location. 

GGSCI (hie-p-ggate) 51> add rmttrail /goldengate/ggs_home/dirdat/test/ru, extract dpmp1

RMTTRAIL added.

After deleting and adding now we can see the extract trail for the target with new location. 

GGSCI (hie-p-ggate) 52> INFO EXTTRAIL

       Extract Trail: /goldengate/ggs_home/dirdat/test/ru

        Seqno Length: 6

   Flip Seqno Length: yes

             Extract: DPMP1

               Seqno: 0

                 RBA: 0

           File Size: 500M

       Extract Trail: D:\app\oracle\product\ogg_1\lt

        Seqno Length: 6

   Flip Seqno Length: yes

             Extract: EXT1

               Seqno: 0

                 RBA: 0

           File Size: 100M

GGSCI (hie-p-ggate) 53>

Oracle Database Upgrade made easy with AutoUpgrade utility

Upgrading Oracle database is undoubtedly a daunting task which requires a careful study, planning and execution to prevent any potential post upgrade shortcomings. Since Oracle determined to release a new Oracle version every year, at some-point-of-time, we all should focus on upgrading databases quite often than we used to perform earlier.

Thanks to AutoUpgrade tool(utility), available with MOS Doc ID : 2485457.1, automates all upgrade process procedure without much human intervention or inputs. For latest AutoUpgrade utility version, always refer the MOD note and download. Though, with 12.2(DBJAN2019RU), 18.5 and 19.3, the AutoUpgrade utility available by default under the oracle home.

AutoUpgrade is a command-line tool which can be used to upgrade one or many oracle databases with one command and a single configuration file. This utility automates upgrade process, such as, pre-upgrade tasks, performs automated fix-ups, perform database upgrade and run through post upgrade tasks as well. This saves a huge time and money when upgrading hundreds of databases in any environment.



I am pretty sure AutoUpgrade make DBA's like easier when it comes to Oracle database upgrade. Have fun and test the capabilities of the tool.



References:
MOS Doc ID : AutoUpgrade Tool (Doc ID 2485457.1)
https://mikedietrichde.com/2019/04/29/the-new-autoupgrade-utility-in-oracle-19c/
https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/19/upgrd/about-oracle-database-autoupgrade.html#GUID-3FCFB2A6-4617-4783-828A-41BD635FC88C