Monitoring- Migration to Multitenant and Fleet Management

Ideally, you are seeing that there are opportunities for database administrators with fleet management. Whether we are talking about patching or Autonomous Dedicated, the architecture and infrastructure need to be configured and managed, even if the Autonomous Database is then provided on demand.

The health of the environment also needs to be monitored.

The dedicated environment has some similar choices as database creation, but notice that the software and patching are automated.

Even with automation, there are different areas that management and policies that can be inserted to make sure you are meeting your company’s requirements.

It is also important for the fleet administrator to monitor the ADBs and tune them.

There might be different configurations needed for VMs or for the Autonomous Container Database. Just like with the migration of pluggable databases, the fleet administration can relocate databases in different containers to help with performance or redistribute resources as needed.

This is part of the monitoring and migration tasks that are needed for the dedicated system.

Restoring and availability come into play here too. Most of the details of the previous chapters can be leveraged to manage large and cloud databases.

A dedicated environment also lets you set the different options in the maintenance schedule and types of patching. With ADB-S, there are no choices, but with dedicated, it can meet your company’s needs and maintenance windows and backup strategies.

This also includes deciding on the VM clusters and how many Autonomous Container Databases are created and the resources allocated.

When migrating to multitenant and cloud, the database administrator’s job is changing. There are options for fleet administration and FPP Server management. The administration tasks here are infrastructure system administration responsibilities.

Next, we are going to look at other ways the administration role is changing with the management of the data.

Provisioning- Migration to Multitenant and Fleet Management

The ADB Dedicated architecture consists of the following:
• Exadata infrastructure
• Autonomous VM cluster
• Autonomous Container Database
• Autonomous Database

The Exadata infrastructure can be in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) region or can be Exadata Cloud@Customer (so in your data center). This will include the compute nodes, storage, and networking.

The VM cluster is the set of virtual machines set up for the Autonomous Container Databases to run on, and it provides high availability with all of the nodes. The VMs will be allocated all of the resources of the Exadata infrastructure.

The Autonomous Container Database is the CDB that will be set up to manage the pluggable databases. Autonomous Databases are pluggable databases that can be configured to be transactional or configured for data warehouse workloads.

Provisioning will include all of these components. Fleet administrators will need the right policies and permissions at the cloud tenancy level and then need system DBA permissions to create CDBs and PDBs. The architecture should use a compartment in the tenancy to properly allocate resources and policies at the right level. In the OCI tenancy, create a compartment for the users, VMs, databases, and other resources.

Policies

After creating a compartment in the tenancy, let’s call it fleetdatabases in our examples, a group should be created to manage the fleet administrators, fleetDBA. The policies and users should be added to the group.
Here is a list of policies that can be manually edited in the OCI console under Policies for the compartment:
Allow group fleetDBA to manage cloud-exadata-infrastructures in compartment fleetdatabases
Allow group fleetDBA to manage autonomous-database-family in compartment fleetdatabases
Allow group fleetDBA to use virtual-network-family in compartment fleetdatabases
Allow group fleetDBA to use tag-namespaces in compartment fleetdatabases Allow group fleetDBA to use tag-defaults in compartment fleetdatabase

Note Compartments, groups, and policies are all created through the oCi console. if you want to automate this process and use either the command line or scripts, there are ways to do this through creating terraform scripts for consistent provisioning in the environments.

Fleet administrators can either have permission to give database users the permissions for Autonomous Databases or have the policies created for the database user groups. These would be users managing and using the Autonomous Databases in their own compartment in the tenancy.

Policies can depend on the environment and what the users are allowed to do. There might be additional policies that would be allowed, or different users might be allowed only certain policies. Here are some additional examples:
Allow group ADBusers to manage autonomous-databases in compartment ADBuserscompartment
Allow group ADBusers to manage autonomous-backups in compartment ADBuserscompartment
Allow group ADBusers to use virtual-network-family in compartment ADBuserscompartment
Allow group ADBusers to manage instance-family in compartment ADBuserscompartment
Allow group ADBusers to manage buckets in compartment ADBuserscompartment

Users can be added to the groups with the policies for permissions. The fleet administrators would be in the fleetDBA group, and those just using ADBs would be in the ADBusers group.