Hybrid Cloud Management using Oracle Enterprise Management

Dinesh Gupta
Apr 4, 2016
2 min read

EM Cloud Control now provides a single pane of glass for monitoring and managing both On-Premise and Oracle Cloud deployments, all from the same management console. Latest release of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 5 (12.1.0.5) introduced Hybrid Cloud Management. By deploying Hybrid Cloud Agents onto the Oracle Cloud virtual hosts serving Oracle Cloud services, all targets including oracle Cloud targets can be managed seamlessly. The communication between Management Agents and your On-Premise Oracle Management Service instances is secure from external interference. EM Cloud Control supports the use of additional external HTTP proxies that support tunneling, which can be configured for the gateway agents to connect to the Oracle Cloud.

Hybrid Cloud Management Architecture

Three main components of Hybrid Cloud Management

Hybrid Cloud Gateway Agent - The Management Agents that provide a communication channel between the Oracle Cloud virtual hosts and the OMS deployed On-Premise
Hybrid Cloud Agent - The Management Agents deployed on Oracle Cloud virtual hosts that enable Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (deployed On-Premise) to monitor and manage Oracle Cloud targets.
Hybrid Cloud Gateway Proxy - The proxy process that enables the Hybrid Cloud Gateway Agent to communicate with the Hybrid Cloud Agent. The proxy process is always initiated by the Hybrid Cloud Gateway Agent.

Major Steps To Deploy Hybrid Cloud Agent

Convert any On-Premise EM agent as Hybrid Cloud Gateway Agent
Hybrid Cloud Agent is deployed using SSH push mechanism from On-Premise EM
On-Premise OMS initiates requests to Hybrid Agent using HTTP tunneling over SSH
Gateway Proxy works by getting HTTPS requests from Hybrid Agent and streams the request to the Gateway over SSH
Gateway should have direct SSH connect to OPC or through corporate proxy
Multiple Gateway’s are recommended to achieve scalable and highly available monitoring
Simple Registration and de-registration mechanisms
Register - Run emcli command from On-Premises OMS home
emcliregister_hybridgateway_agents -agent_list='<list of EM agents names separated by space>’
Deregister - Gateway back to EM Agent:
emclideregister_hybridgateway_agent-hybridgateway_agent_list="<hybrid_cloud_gateway_agents>"
External proxy that supports SSH tunneling (for example, SOCK4, SOCK5, HTTP)
select target_name,agent_name from MGMT$AGENTS_MONITORING_TARGETS where target_type='oracle_hybridcloud_connection'
Ensure that port 22 is open on the destination Oracle Cloud virtual host
Ensure that port 1748, or at least one port in the range 1830 - 1848 is free on the destination Oracle Cloud virtual host
Ensure that at least one named credential that uses SSH public key authentication has been setup
In Cloud Control, from the Setup menu, select Add Target, then click Add Targets Manually. On the Add Targets Manually page, select Add Host Targets, then click Add Host and follow the instructions
In the Optional Details section, remember to select Configure Hybrid Cloud Agent and then provide Hybrid Cloud Gateway Agent and Proxy Port details.

Conclusion:

The enhancements available in EM Cloud Control are intended to provide centralized visibility and control while ensuring that customers’ existing company-wide standards are applied across the environment.

The latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager offers enhancements designed to help customers manage, migrate, test and deploy applications and databases across hybrid clouds, with reuse of existing management tools and practices, from a single pane of glass.