Oracle Maximum avaiability Documents

http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/htdocs/maa.htm

Oracle ASM Information

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/asm/index.html

Backup and Recovery using Oracle RMAN

Overview of RMAN Functional Components

The RMAN environment consists of the utilities and databases that play a role in backing up your data. At a minimum, the environment for RMAN must include the following:

• The target database to be backed up


• The RMAN client, which interprets backup and recovery commands, directs server sessions to execute those commands, and records your backup and recovery activity in the target database control file.

Some environments will also use these optional components:

• A flash recovery area, a disk location in which the database can store and manage files related to backup and recovery


• Media management software, required for RMAN to interface with backup devices such as tape drives


• A recovery catalog database, a separate database schema used to record RMAN activity against one or more target databases

Please check the above diagram illustrates these components

New Features in Oracle Database 10g Release 2

Backup Set Encryption

Backup security is vital to the well-being of any company. Backups should only be able to be opened and read by their creators. With Oracle Database 10gR2, backup sets made to disk can now be encrypted, for the whole database or particular tablespaces, using the new CONFIGURE ENCRYPTION FOR [DATABASE TABLESPACE …] option.

Unused Block Compression

With unused block compression (enabled by default), only the currently used blocks are read and written during a full backup. This speeds up backups and reduces backup size. In previous releases, blocks that are currently unused, but had been used at some point in the past, were required to continue to be backed up. Also, blocks that have never been used are never backed up.

Dynamic Channel Allocation for RAC Environments

By configuring the PARALLELISM parameter, RMAN will dynamically allocate the specified number of channels across all active RAC nodes, to perform the backup or restore operation. RMAN utilizes Oracle Clusterware (formerly known as Cluster Ready Services) to allocate channels to the least loaded nodes, to perform the operations. In this way, the overall backup or restore workload can be distributed across the RAC nodes more efficiently.

Enterprise Manager Enhancements

Oracle Enterprise Manager, a single, integrated solution for administering and monitoring systems and applications based on the Oracle technology stack, is further enhanced for managing and monitoring backup jobs.

Database Control allows DBAs to view all backup jobs by date range and backup type (e.g. full, datafile, archive log), along with their status (e.g. "completed", "completed with warnings"), input and output sizes, and output rate. Each backup job can be further drilled down to review input files and output backup sets/image copies, their sizes, and compression ratio (if enabled).

Grid Control offers several enhancements to manage backups across the enterprise. Backup jobs can be viewed across all target databases, and a failed job can be easily restarted without having to resubmit the job again. In case a backup job fails, the DBA can be notified immediately via email. In addition, user-defined RMAN scripts can be created as jobs and applied to any number of target databases. The recovery wizard has also been enhanced to allow restore and recovery to a different Oracle home, in the event that the original Oracle home or database is lost.

Please find the Oracle Recovery Manager 10g overview in below PDF:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/pdf/TWP_HA_RMANOverview_10g_111503.pdf

Oracle Recovery Manager 10g New Features Overview:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/pdf/rman_10g_fov.pdf

Using Recovery Manager with Oracle Data Guard in Oracle Database 10g:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/pdf/RMAN_DataGuard_10g_wp.pdf

RMAN Backup and Recovery Optimization:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/pdf/br_optimization.pdf

RMAN and Media Manager Troubleshooting Guide:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/pdf/rman_mm_troubleshoot.pdf

Oracle Database 10g Migration to Automatic Storage Management:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/availability/pdf/Technical_WP_ASM_Migration.pdf

Version Control Manager

Number of softwares are available in the market to provide the functionality of Version Control. Serena Version Control manager (Formerly PVCS) is one in that.

It is very difficult to manage and coordinate concurrent development process and the teams sitting in different locations.

Version Manager enables teams of any size and varying locations to coordinate concurrent development, with secure access and a complete audit trail. Version Manager improves the quality of the final product and accelerates team development enterprise-wide by automating common tasks; increasing code reuse; and eliminating problems caused by lost changes, overwrites, and content errors.

Architecture Over view:

It works on client-server architecture model. Application server resides on the server and java applet is required to access the application from PC.

The following are the installation steps:

1. Install the license Manager
2. Get the license from Serena site
3. Enable the license manager by applying the license key
4. Install Apache software (Optional)
4. Install the Version Control Manager
5. Integrate the Apache with Version Manager Application server.

Apache server installation is optional. You can use the application server (JBOSS) which will be installed by Version Manager directly to access the version manager.

Version Manager Works based on the two license models . They are:

1. Named licenses
2. Concurrent licenses

Mercury IT Governance Center ( Kintana )

Kintana ( ITG ) Details

Note: The IT Governance Name has been changed to PPM ( projects and porrtfolio Management Centre ). Please check www.hp.com for more detials .

Architecture Over View

Mercury IT Governance Center employs a three-tier architecture consisting of:

Client Tier

The client tier consists of:

• The Mercury IT Governance Center standard interface, which is rendered using JSP (Java Server Pages) and is accessed using a Web browser.


• The Mercury IT Governance Workbench interface, executed using a Java applet installed on the client machine, and launched using the Sun Java plug-in to a Web browser

Communication between the client and application server tiers is accomplished as follows:

• For the standard interface, HTTP or HTTPS, with no code required on end user's smachines. The client accesses information from the database through the J2EE application server using a shared database session pool.


• For the Workbench interface, RMI (Remote Method Invocation) or SRMI (Secure Remote Method Invocation), which has been optimized by Mercury for use in Mercury IT Governance Center.

The architecture and communication protocols have been created to minimize the number of round trips between the applet and server, and the volume of data transferred.

Application Server Tier

The application server:

• Runs on the Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, and Red Hat Linux platforms


• Uses the JBoss Application Server, which has full J2EE 1.3 (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) support


• Houses workflow, scheduling, notification, and execution engines that drive automated tasks like code deployment to remote systems, dynamic routing, and email notifications


• Can run on one or more machines as a cluster to improve performance and scale hardware as usage increases


• Can optionally integrate with external Web servers like Sun Java System Web Server (formerly Sun ONE Web Server and iPlanet), Microsoft IIS, and Apache


• Maintains a database connection pool that caches connections to the database, which eliminates the need to restart the application server if the database shuts down for scheduled maintenance or system failure


• The protocol used for communication between Mercury IT Governance Server
  and Mercury IT Governance Web server is AJP13—a protocol similar to HTTP that has been optimized for performance.
  

Communication between the application server and database tiers is achieved
using JDBC (Java Database Connectivity).

Database Tier

The database tier consists of an Oracle database containing the tables,
procedures, PL/SQL packages, and other components used by the Mercury IT
Governance Center products. All transaction, setup, and auditing data is stored
in the database. Mercury IT Governance Center can run on a single database
instance, or can leverage Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) configuration
for load balancing, redundancy, and failover.
Mercury IT Governance Center supports the following Oracle database
features:

• A relational data model


• Use of Oracle stored procedures to implement business logic (for example,workflow processing)


• Use of a database pool to eliminate creation of a separate database session for each user or transaction


• Database caching of frequently used data, programs, and procedures to improve performance

Business Technology Optimization and the IT Governance Process :

Business technology optimization refers to the strategies and processes involved in aligning IT with business goals to maximize IT’s business value. Mercury IT Governance Center is used to digitize and automate IT business processes from demand through production to enable customers to optimize and align IT strategy and execution.


IT Governance Centre :

IT Governance Centre consist a set of products ( applications ) :

• Change management
• Demand Management
• Portfolio Management
• Program Management
• Project Management
• Resource Managemen
• Time Management
• Financial Management
  

Change Management:

Mercury Change Management enables you to plan, package, release, and deploy changes to your applications portfolio. It digitizes best practice software change management processes across platforms and environments (such as mainframe, UNIX, NT, and Linux), types of change (code,configurations, content), or applications (such as Oracle,PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel). By automating formerly manual tasks, Change Management lets you accomplish more with less and dramatically lessen the risk of “broken” deployments.

With Mercury Change Management, you can:

• You can automate code migration accorss the instances ( Ex. code like sql components , oracle forms , reports , discoverer reports , packages , procesedures , Oracle applications 11i AOL components etc )
• You can automate patch application of Oracle E-business suite instances.
• You can also automate the clonning of instances.

Demand Management:

Mercury Demand Management is a product of Mercury IT Governance Center that manages requests from creation to implementation. Each request is processed using a graphical workflow. Demand Management features tools and configurable processes for dealing with these requests. Data is captured by prompting for process-specific information. This ensures the required information is collected and validated at the appropriate time in the process.

Mercury Demand Management can follow complex business rules by using different approval methods. Email and pager notifications can be generated as the request passes through the various stages of the workflow. Prioritization and delegation features allow requests to efficiently advance through their specific workflow, routing them to the relevant department, group, orindividual.

Portfolio Management :

Mercury Portfolio Management provides a real-time governance setup that supports your strategic, financial, functional, and technical requirements. Ideal for new initiatives that grow and transform your business as well as existing applications that run your business, Mercury Portfolio Management can help you align your IT portfolio with your business strategy and maximize portfolio value.

Mercury Portfolio Management allows business and IT stakeholders to collaboratively govern your portfolio with proper levels of review and approval. Mercury Portfolio Management monitors the entire portfolio lifecycle (proposal justification and review, project initiation, execution, deployment, and benefits realization) and enables stakeholders to make better portfolio decisions and analyze what-if scenarios using easy-to-build scenario comparisons.

Program Management:

Mercury Program Management allows a program manager to deliver a new business capability or solve a problem using programs. Using programs, a program manager can do the following:

• Oversee related IT projects
• Coordinate inter-project deliverable and milestones
• Manage scope change
• Identify and mitigate risks
• Resolve inter-project issues
• Manage the allocation of resources
• Initiate program requests (by stakeholders)

Project Management:

Mercury Project Management enables organizations to streamline and standardize the management of project activities using a template-based,collaborative approach. Project plans are defined as a hierarchical structure of projects and subprojects that logically group and organize tasks or activities.

Project Management defines the step-by-step processes required to complete specific tasks and deliverables. Organizations can easily manage project plan activities within and across the technology chain because all project team members, whether internal or external, collaborate and interact through an intuitive interface. The underlying product framework guides users through a dynamic, self-documenting process to support activities such as the execution of standardized checklists or the collection of deliverables using document attachments.

Resource Management:

Mercury IT Governance Center provides an array of tools for managing personnel related to IT initiatives. Organizational modeling capabilities keep track of where resources are located and who they report to. Skill modeling capabilities unlock the potential of resources. As resources are assigned to tasks and requests, executives and managers have full visibility into the capacity of their teams and the load placed on them, in terms of both current operational use and capacity planning for the future.

Time Management:Talk about the time management of the resources and effective utilization of time.
Financial Management : it talks about the budget

Note : For more detials about the licence and complete documentation please contact HP ( www.hp.com ) . The reference for the above content are HP-Mercury Documents.

HP Testing Tools

Quality Centere ( Test Director ) :

TestDirectory is product of HP . It is a bug tracking system . It contains application server and database schema.

TestDirector application works using JBOSS application server . You can also use other application servers like IIS / Apache.

It requires database schema to store the information of TestDIrector transaction. You can either oracle database or SQL server database for this purpose.

It provides the add-ins to integrate Load Runner (performance testing tool), Quick test Professional (Functional Testing automation tool) and IT Governance (Kintana).


Load Runner :

Coming soon .....

Quick Test Professional :

Coming soon .....

Useful Metalink Notes

Oracle Apps11i :

1. Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Technology Stack Documentation Roadmap : https://metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/f?p=130:14:1047314972424665344::::p14_database_id,p14_docid,p14_show_header,p14_show_help,p14_black_frame,p14_font:NOT,207159.1,1,1,0,helvetica

Oracle 10g Database , RAC and ASM :



Oracle 10g Discoverer:


Oracle SSO :

Installation of the Metadata Repository and Identity Management in High Availability Environment

Step1 : Note 359695.1: How To Install and Configure Metadata Repository for Cluster Identity Management in High Availability Environment

Step2 : Note 359715.1: How To Install and Configure Cluster Identity Management Node1 (IM1) in High Availability Environment.

Step3 : Note 359726.1: How To Install and Configure Cluster Identity Management Node2 (IM2) in High Availability Environment

Useful Articles for : DBAs :
Useful Articles for the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Stack for Technical Consultant / DBA [ID 828157.1]

VMWare installation and Configuration

It is very difficult to setting up test RAC environments and test linux servers because of cost and unavailability of storage. In general , storage is provided by a SAN or high-end NAS devices which are very expensive. A cheaper alternative is to use VMware Server .

Using VMware Server you can run multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on a single server, allowing you to run both RAC nodes on a single machine. In additon, it allows you to set up shared virtual disks.

Download the VMware software from below link and install the VMWare software on your windows system.

http://www.vmware.com/download/server/

Creating Virtual Machines:

Find the complete details in attached word document how to create virtual machines.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgb2tkhv_0f4h2rvhs

Oracle 10g RAC On Linux Using VMware Server

User the below links to create Oracle 10g RAC with ASM on VMWare linux servers.

1. http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/10g/OracleDB10gR2RACInstallationOnCentos4UsingVMware.php