Skip to content

DBAzine.com

Sections
Personal tools
You are here: Home » Blogs » Chris Foot Blog » Chris Foot's Oracle10g Blog » 10G R2 Multi-Host Script Execution and Oracle ASM Intro
Seeking new owner for this high-traffic DBAzine.com site.
Tap into the potential of this DBA community to expand your business! Interested? Contact us today.
Who Are You?
I am a:
Mainframe True Believer
Distributed Fast-tracker

[ Results | Polls ]
Votes : 3569
 

10G R2 Multi-Host Script Execution and Oracle ASM Intro 10G R2 Multi-Host Script Execution and Oracle ASM Intro

A weird combination of topics to start the New Year on but I think it is important for us to cover a few interesting enhancements contained in 10G R2 Enterprise Manager.

In addition, we are starting our official ASM (Automatic Storage Management) evaluation project . The end result of the project would be the conversion of 10.2 Terabytes of disk to Oracle ASM. Could make for a very interesting set of blogs, don't you think?

Introduction
This blog may become a little confusing in the future. I want to continue our discussion on 10G Enterprise Manager R2. There are some beneficial enhancements I think everyone needs to know about. As I have said before, the days of command line administration are over. 10G Grid Control R2 is the tool that we should be using to monitor, administer and tune our Oracle environments.

Hard for me to believe that a few short years ago, I was describing the first release of Oracle Enterprise Manager as a SGT (Sissy GUI Tool) to my students. But Database Administrators are facing a future that contains smaller staffs, ever-increasing workloads and muti-vendor database environments. Any feature that we can take advantage of to reduce the amount of time we spend administering databases must be investigated and evaluated. I firmly believe that this blog on multi-host script execution and future blogs on 10G R2's new multi-database SQL execution and reporting features will save us time administering Oracle environments. As a result, it is important for us to cover them.

But we are also starting a rather large ASM project. In case you aren't aware, Oracle10G provides its own disk storage management system. Database administrators are no longer required to use hardware vendor or third-party (Veritas, EMC, etc) disk volume managers to provide striping and mirroring functionality. ASM manages the raw disks within the Oracle database architecture. Administrators are able to assign disks to disk groups, which can then be striped and/or mirrored to provide high performance and high availability. During tablespace creation, the administrator assigns the tablespace datafile to a disk group. This differs from previous Oracle releases which required that datafiles be assigned to the individual disks themselves.

I would like to provide readers with an in-depth, blow-by-blow analysis of our ASM evaluation and implementation. We intend to perform the traditional style of evaluation activities that technicians have been doing since Scott's tiger was a cub. We will be creating a sand-box test environment that we will use to initially evaluate ASM. If we like what we see, we will convert one of our smaller test warehouse systems. If all goes well, we will ultimately migrate 10.2 TB of storage to ASM.

So I intend to continue to our discussion on 10G Enterprise Manager but the blogs will have to now "share the spotlight" with our ASM evaluation activities. It should make for a VERY interesting set of blogs. Let's get back to the topic at hand…

Executing Host Commands and Scripts Using 10G Grid Control R2
10G Grid Control R2 provides an easy-to-use panel that allows administrators to run host commands and scripts against multiple host targets at the same time. The benefits of this feature are only constrained by the DBA's imagination (or lack thereof) . Pick any command or script, choose a set of host targets, run the command against the multiple targets and review the output. It is really that simple.

Navigating to the Execute Host Command Home Page
We first need to weave our way through 10G Enterprise Manager R2 to the Execute Host Command Home page. We do that by first logging on to 10G Grid Control R2 and selecting the Targets Tab at the top of 10G Grid Control R2's Home Page.

10G Grid Control R2 displays the Hosts Home page. The Hosts Home page in 10G Grid Control R2 looks pretty close to its 10G Grid Control R1 counterpart. The page shows an Up/Down status, number of alerts, exceptions, policy violations, etc.. The page also displays the "big three of performance", which are CPU, memory and I/O performance measurements.

Execute Host Command Home Page
If we scroll down to the bottom of the page, we see a new link titled "Execute Host Command." Our next step is to click on that link. 10G Grid Control R2 displays the Execute Host Command Home page. Let's spend a couple of minutes on the contents of this page.

If we start at the top, you'll see that I have already entered my first host command (ls -ltr) in the Host Command text box. The Execute Host Command Home page also allows users to load a script from their client or from a monitored host target by clicking on the 'Load OS Script" navigation button.

10G Grid Control R2 also allows us to maintain a library of commonly used scripts in the Enterprise Manager Repository. We navigate to the library of stored scripts by selecting the 'Load from Job Library' buttons that 10G Grid Control R2 displays at the top and bottom of the Execute Host Command Home page. Since this is a very new installation of 10G Grid Control R2, we don't have any scripts stored in the library. But I expect us to take advantage of this feature very soon. Having access to a library of commonly used scripts that is stored, secured and backed up in an Oracle database should provide us with great benefit.

Adding Targets
Now that I have entered my 'ls -ltr' command in the text box, let's add some host targets to execute it on. I do this by clicking on the 'ADD' button that is displayed on the lower right hand side of the Execute Host Command Home page. 10G Grid Control R2 responds by displaying the Add Targets pop-up window. I am able to choose one, or all, of the monitored targets. I select them by clicking on the 'Select' check box at the beginning of each host's row.

Once I have selected the desired host targets, I click on the 'Select' navigation button that is displayed on the lower right hand corner of the pop-up. 10G Grid Control R2 returns us back to the Execute Host Command Home page. Only this time, it looks a little different. The display table at the bottom of the page contains all of the hosts we have selected.

Executing the Command
Our next step is to execute the 'ls -ltr' command by clicking on the 'Execute' navigation button. 10G Grid Control R2 displays the Processing: Executing Host Command status page. The numbers will increment as the command is executed on the different hosts. When the command is complete, 10G Grid Control R2 returns us to the Execute Host Command Home page. Once again, the home page looks a little different.

Host Command Output
The page now displays the output from the command. Each row in the output table contains a single host's output. We can expand or collapse the output displayed. This allows us to easily navigate through the different host's output. We can also save the output in an HTML file by clicking on the 'Save Results' navigation button.

Execution History
We are able to review previous command executions by clicking on the 'Execution History' button that is displayed on the top right hand side of the Execute Host Command Home page. The command execution output page allows us to load the results if we want to review them again, or load just the command or script to execute them to obtain more current information.

Summary
I hope you enjoyed my first blog of the New Year. In my next blog, I'll discuss the multi-database SQL execution feature available in Oracle's latest and greatest release of Enterprise Manager, 10G Grid Control R2.

Thanks for Reading!



Monday, January 09, 2006  |  Permalink |  Comments (0)
trackback URL:   http://www.dbazine.com/blogs/blog-cf/chrisfoot/blogentry.2006-01-08.4154171355/sbtrackback
 

Powered by Plone