Use EM 11g Grid Control (or 12c) versus opatch to save time with quarterly PSUs?
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2012 01:38:54 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <1342773534.57464.YahooMailNeo_at_web113507.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
For a shop with 30 instances on a dozen hosts, would it make sense to use Grid Control EM 11g or EM 12c to deploy PSUs? Is one more reliable than the other? Our approach is opatch. And each quarter it takes much labor, time, and frustration to complete. We have an aging but functioning EM 10g Grid Control infrastructure. Never tried to use it for patching. But we have the diagnostic + tuning packs for our instances. So we should be licensed to use this technology for PSUs. When I've suggested we upgrade to EM 11g or EM 12c I typically get a response of the variety "we don't have time for that" (e.g. researching, testing, and then deploying EM 11g or 12c). My opinion? We don't have time *not* to do this. It's an investment in efficiency and I take the long view. It gives me no pleasure, and much pain, to repeatedly hear "we don't have time to learn X" when X is something that will improve efficiency, customer service, excellence, etc.
Sound familiar to anyone? If so, how have you played it short of finding another gig? I may try to track all staff hours involved with getting July PSUs completed to have some baseline metrics--everyone from the DBA team (reading about quirks and idiosyncracies of various PSUs on particular platforms/Oracle releases) to sysadmins to ops to managers, etc. In the time it takes to coordinate and execute the work using opatch, I can't help but wonder if we could have set-up at least EM 11g Grid Control in preparation for the next quarter. For now, I'm trying to socialize a January 1st, 2013 date to deploy EM 11g or EM 12c for patching and other goodness. You know, try to implement it, at least on some Production Floor dev and test boxes, when things have slowed down and most people (here in the U.S.) will be out of the office.
It may be that patching with EM 11g or EM 12c isn't patching nirvana. I'm not sure precisely how many staff hours (and frustration) it might save. Would love to hear personal stories here. But I'll settle for incremental improvement so we can move on to work higher up the value chain. If all my instances got moved to The Cloud, for instance, patching is a task I wouldn't miss.
Finally, are there cases in which folks would recommend sticking with opatch versus applying patches with Grid/Cloud Control? I imagine in very small shops using opatch would be fine. But in shops as large as the one I've described or larger--when DBAs are managing hundreds or thousands of instances--I can't imagine using opatch. Not unless it is fully scripted in some way.
If no one bites, and persists in saying "we don't have time for this", I'm going to make time on my home sandbox and work everything out there on my own time. Feels like The Right Thing To Do. Because an operational DBA group could always say "we don't have time for X." It's a bit like saying� "I don't have money to invest in a retirement plan." Decades pass and then you find you have to work forever...
-- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Fri Jul 20 2012 - 03:38:54 CDT