Oracle Grid Control
I am going to confess that setting up Oracle Grid Control was no easy task, I do think that the Oracle documentation is not an easy read, they really need a quick setup guide.
Firstly the Virtual Machine needs to be a bit more powerful and you do require more disk space, I have allocated 50GB, this will allow me to install and keep the installation binaries. Again I have prepared the Linux server in the same way as the primary database server, I also used the oracle-validated RPM to prepare the server for Oracle.
Prepare Oracle using oracle-validated | ## as root ## install oracle-validated |
I am not going to explain in detail how to setup grid control but point you to some sites that have already done this, but I will highlight some of the pitfalls I encountered, firstly GRID control is very picky on what versions you use, so don't go getting the latest versions of everything. I spent nearly 4 days wondering why I could not install grid as it kept crashing during the OMS configuration section with "network address port issues" it turned out that I was using the wrong version of weblogic, so read the documents and make sure all the version are supported, I used the following
Again make sure you use compatible versions otherwise you will be in a world of pain and many late nights. Use the links below and just follow them and the installation of grid will go smoothly.
http://www.ora-solutions.net/papers/HowTo_Installation_GridControl_11g_RHEL5.pdf
Just to recap the steps I took are the following
Hopefully you should then have a running Grid Control server, I created the below scripts to allow me to have control over starting and stopping Grid for the primary database , I removed all startup/shutdown scripts from /etc/rc*.d and /etc/init.d.
startup script | ## Edit the /etc/oratab file and change the database line to a Y #!/bin/ksh GRID_HOME=/u01/app/11.2.0/grid clear echo "Starting ASM" echo "" echo "Starting Oracle Database" echo "Starting Grid Agent" |
shutdown script | ## The shutdown script is as follows #!/bin/ksh GRID_HOME=/u01/app/11.2.0/grid clear echo "Stopping Grid Agent" echo "Stopping Oracle Database" echo "" echo "Stopping ASM" |
I personally like to start and stop the whole server just to make sure I am confident in shutdown and restarting the server and see that everything starts correctly.
On a final note Oracle really should make this whole process a lot easier, it really does harp back to the old days where you are holding your breath to get things working hoping that everything goes smoothly, I spent 4 very frustrating days getting this whole process right and searching the web for documentation, a better idea would be to create a whole virtual VM that you could just install in your ESX server, especially as Oracle now has all the components including the O/S.
Now that we have a Grid control server running we need to install the grid agent on our all our servers. Download and unzip the Oracle Grid Control Agent onto each server, once this is done we will be using the silent and responseFile options to install the agent, this means we have to create a responseFile
responseFile | ## Edit the file, I have changed the below options only Note: this is a link to the whole responseFile |
Once you have the responseFile configured use the following command to install the agent, use your path on where you placed you response file
install the Grid Agent | cd /home/oracle/stage/grid_agent/linux_x64/agent ./runInstaller -silent -responseFile /home/oracle/stage/grid_agent/linux_x64/response/first_response.rsp |
Once that has been completed you need to run the below as run, this will set some permission on some of the agent files, you may have to change the path depending on where you installed the agent
run as root | cd /u01/app/oracle/product/agent11g/agent11g |
The install seemed to go all ok, but the final message stated that it failed, If you received this message then follow the below steps to clear everything down and restart the agent, hopefully the agent should hook into the Grid control server
cleardown and restart the agent | emctl stop agent rm -f $AGENT_HOME/sysman/emd/upload/* |
Again I think that this process should be a whole lot easier.