Preface

The Administrator's Guide for Software and Server Provisioning and Patching introduces you to the lifecycle management solutions offered by Enterprise Manager Grid Control, and helps you understand what Deployment Procedures are and how they can be used for meeting your provisioning and patching requirements.

The guide has been created with great care and attention using multiple sources of information, including valuable notes from My Oracle Support, white papers and marketing collaterals from product management, feedback from development teams and also from customers that came in the form of bugs, services requests, and so on.

Understandably, this guide describes one of the most critical offerings of Enterprise Manager Grid Control and since some of the concepts may be difficult to describe using textual descriptions, we have considered some of the best practices in the industry and added as many examples and graphics as possible to help you understand the concepts, processes, and features better.

Audience

This guide is primarily meant for administrators who want to use the Deployment Procedures offered by Enterprise Manager Grid Control to meet their lifecycle management challenges. As an administrator, you can be either a Designer, who performs the role of a system administrator and does critical data center operations, or an Operator, who runs the out-of-box, automated procedures to maintain the enterprise configuration.

Structure of the Document

This guide covers conceptual information, facts you must know before you start using the Deployment Procedures, and a comprehensive set of instructions that help you understand how you can run the Deployment Procedures for different areas.

This section describes how the entire guide is structured. In particular, this section describes the following:

Different Parts of the Guide
Structure of the Chapters

Different Parts of the Guide

This guide has the following parts:

Part	Description
Part I, "Overview and Setup Details"	Introduces you to the lifecycle management solutions offered by Enterprise Manager Grid Control, describes the concepts and terms related to these solutions, and the infrastructure requirements for running the Deployment Procedures.
Part II, "Database Provisioning"	Describes the Deployment Procedures offered for provisioning Oracle Databases, Oracle RAC, and Oracle Database Replay Clients. Also describes the Deployment Procedures offered for extending, scaling down, or deleting an existing Oracle RAC instance. Covers information about the supported releases, core components deployed, prerequisites to be met, and instructions to be followed for running the Deployment Procedures.
Part III, "Provisioning Linux Operating System"	Describes how you can provision Linux operating system on bare metal servers and virtual servers.
Part IV, "Provisioning Virtualization Systems"	Describes how you can provision Oracle Virtual Server (OVS) and Guest Virtual Machines, clone Guest Virtual Machines, and live-migrate Guest Virtual Machines.
Part V, "Middleware Provisioning"	Describes the Deployment Procedures offered for provisioning Oracle Application Server, Oracle Service Bus resources, and Oracle BPEL Processes. Covers information about the supported releases, core components deployed, prerequisites to be met, and instructions to be followed for running the Deployment Procedures.
Part VI, "Patching"	Describes the Deployment Procedure offered for patching Oracle Database, ASM, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Clusterware, Oracle RAC, and operating system such as Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Sun Solaris. Covers information about the supported releases, core components deployed, prerequisites to be met, and instructions to be followed for running the Deployment Procedures.
Part VII, "Customization"	Describes how you can customize Deployment Procedures. If you are already familiar with Deployment Procedures and have already used the out-of-box procedures for provisioning and patching, then this part will help you understand how you can create custom copies of those default procedures with changes specific to your environment. For example, you can enable e-mail notifications or even run the procedure as another user.
Part VIII, "Enterprise Manager Command Line Interface (EMCLI)"	Describes the EMCLI commands you can use to run Deployment Procedures.
Part IX, "Additional Information"	Provides additional information that are relevant and related to the details covered in the other chapters of this guide.

Structure of the Chapters

The chapters of part II, III, IV, and V cover multiple use cases and provide a comprehensive set of instructions. These chapters have the following structure:

Getting Started section that helps you get started with that chapter. The section provides a high-level overview of the steps involved in performing a particular provisioning or patching task. Consider this section to be a documentation map to understand the sequence of actions you must take to successfully run a Deployment Procedure. Every step has a set of reference links that you can click to reach the relevant sections within the chapter and view more information.
Deployment Procedure section that describes the Deployment Procedure offered by Enterprise Manager Grid Control for a particular provisioning or patching requirement. Read this section to understand the Deployment Procedure, the use cases it covers, and so on.
Supported Releases section that lists the versions and releases of the target that are supported by the Deployment Procedure for provisioning or patching. Read this section to understand the coverage of the Deployment Procedure.
<Use Case> sections that describe the use cases covered in the chapter. Every use case has the following structure:
- Deployment Phases section that describes the deployment phases involved in a particular provisioning or patching task. Read this section to understand the flow of interview screens involved in the Deployment Procedure.
- Prerequisites section that lists the prerequisites you must meet before running the Deployment Procedure. Read this section and meet all the prerequisites before you move on to the instructions to run the Deployment Procedure.
- Provisioning or Patching Procedure section that outlines the instructions for running the Deployment Procedure. Read this section and follow the steps to successfully run the Deployment Procedure for your provisioning or patching requirement.

Documentation Accessibility

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Access to Oracle Support

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Conventions

The following conventions are used in this document:

Convention	Meaning
boldface	Indicates graphical user interface elements associated with an action, or terms defined in text or the glossary.
italic	Indicates book titles, emphasis, or placeholder variables for which you supply particular values.
`monospace`	Indicates commands within a paragraph, URLs, code in examples, text that appears on the screen, or text that you enter.
Other Graphics	Graphics have been used extensively in addition to the textual descriptions to ensure that certain concepts and processes are illustrated better.