Managing IaaS and DBaaS Clouds with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Setting up a cloud environment is rarely smooth sailing but with this guide to Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, it just got a lot more manageable. Practical advice and lots of examples make it the ideal assistant.

As we discussed earlier, virtualization is the key to IaaS. Oracle VM Manager (part of Enterprise Manager) is a single interface that allows for the management of virtualized resources for your IaaS. VM Manager is the place where you create and manage virtual machines, guest VMs, virtual server pools, and zones for your IaaS. The first thing you need do is to register the VM Manager by adding it as an Enterprise Manager target (refer to the Adding targets manually section in Chapter 1, Setting Up Enterprise Manager).

Before you add Oracle VM Manager as an EM target, make sure you have imported VM Manager certificates in the agent keystore by performing the following:

We will need to set up and configure logical networks that will be connected to the physical network ports on OVM Servers. This is a critical piece of setup, and we suggest you make sure your physical network components (subnets, VLANs) are correctly set up. Enterprise Manager makes this step as painless as possible, but if the underlying physical interfaces are misconfigured, there is a chance that you will encounter difficulty in debugging issues. While setting up OVM Networks, we will need to do the following:

The other important aspect for setting up an Infrastructure as a Service is shared storage. Virtual servers inside the server pool use shared storage mounted on external storage servers, filesystems, or LUNs. These external storage servers are available for the virtual servers via fiber channels or network communication over Ethernet.

Oracle VM Manager makes use of both standard and vendor-specific plugins to support almost all flavors of storage:

A virtual server pool is essentially a container of one or more virtual machines or guest VMs. Server pools allow shared storage access for all the VMs and seamlessly balances the load across resources. You will, of course, need to supply enough physical resources to support the number of VMs within the server pool. Luckily, server pools can scale easily by just adding more physical resources. Let's discuss how we can create server pools:

Oracle Enterprise Manager offers a comprehensive management console where you can perform administration and monitoring of your cloud infrastructure. In this section, we will be focusing on how to utilize the Oracle Enterprise Manager Infrastructure Cloud Home and perform various administrative tasks.

Most of the tasks that you will be concerned with are performed either on Infrastructure Cloud Home, Oracle VM Manager Home, or Virtual Server Pool Home page. We will look at each of these portals in this section.

We have covered quite a bit of ground in setting up a scalable IaaS. We discussed earlier how IaaS's real power is in the way users can utilize the resources via self-service portals. Self-service provisioning is the reason why most enterprises invest in IaaS, as it greatly reduces maintenance and administration costs. In the remaining part of this chapter, we will continue to understand the overall IaaS configuration using Oracle Enterprise Manager and will discuss how we can set up a self-service model using Oracle Enterprise Manager.

The self-service model allows the administrators to manage several routine configurations easily. Administrators can manage VM images, user quotas, compute, and storage resources for server pools and so on.

Let us take a detailed look at steps to set up and configure an IaaS self-service portal.

We have covered quite a bit of ground in understanding the possibilities for creating a scalable Infrastructure as a Service environment. We went through various building blocks of IaaS and we reviewed all the necessary configuration options on Oracle Enterprise Manager. A successful implementation of IaaS requires careful planning and proper estimates of scale. We will talk about another implementation model of Database as a Service in the next chapter. We will also take a look at the various chargeback options available.