OEM Grid Control 11gR1 architecture

As seen in Chapter 1 and in the earlier sections of this chapter, there are great demands on the functionality of an enterprise-wide infrastructure management solution. Not only should the centralized solution be capable of managing tens of thousands of physical entities spread across the landscape that forms the infrastructure, but it also must have the capability to model, monitor, administer, and configure higher-level logical entities that map to business functions. Apart from these, it must also be able to perform complex computations that assess the impact of the various targets on the business functions. Another often ignored demand on the management solution is to take into consideration the geographical spread of the infrastructure landscape. This spread means that data needs to be collected across geographies with differing time zones. Business service models that take into account targets spread across geographies must consider data normalization into a common time zone prior to any computation and impact assessment. The demands of these already complex computations are magnified when we take into consideration the scale of operations across the enterprise.

The key requirement of any management solution including OEM is to be able to provide and perform the above functionalities in a seamless manner. The above demands imply that the architecture must be capable of scaling and performing complex computations, but at the same time it must be simple enough for the administrators and must not overwhelm the enterprise. The success of any management solution will depend on its footprint within the enterprise. A successful management solution must be able to perform complex computations and scale very easily with a simple architecture and a small footprint.

The following image illustrates and introduces the high-level architecture of OEM 11gR1:

The key pieces of the architecture are as follows:

The key parts of the management solution are the management agent, the OMS, and the management repository. The management repository provides the data storage to the OMS. The OMS provides current and future insights into business functions and services by looking at the historical data that is stored in this management repository. The OEM console application bridges the gap between the end administrative user and the OMS. It provides views into each of the targets and also allows the user to initiate actions and configuration changes on these targets.

As seen in the preceding screenshot, the Grid Control architecture is distributed in nature and relies on the agents to collect data on the individual hosts. This data is then transferred by the agent to the OMS and aggregated by the OMS at the enterprise level. The OMS has built-in logic that operates on the data to determine target states and performance. By distributing the data collection to individual agents the OMS is freed up to perform more important tasks. Let's now look at each of these architecture pieces in detail.