Announcement: Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12.1and 13.x do not Support Failsafe Environments (Doc ID 1581690.1)

Last updated on FEBRUARY 20, 2024

Applies to:

Details

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control does not support management of Microsoft Clusters through Oracle Fail Safe.

Starting with version 12.1, and including the 13.x versions, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control cannot be used  to monitor and manage Oracle Databases that participate in a Microsoft Failover Clustering environment. This change does not affect Oracle Fail Safe, its native user interface and functionality. The Fail Safe Manager GUI or the command-line interface can still be used to monitor and manage Oracle Fail Safe environments.

What are Failover Clusters and the Oracle Fail Safe feature and how do they integrate with Enterprise Manager?

Failover clusters are designed for applications that have long-running in-memory state, or that have large, frequently updated data states. These are called stateful applications and they include database applications and messaging applications. Typical uses for failover clusters include file servers, print servers, database servers, and messaging servers.

Oracle Fail Safe is high availability software, integrated with Microsoft Failover Cluster. It provides a fast, easy, and accurate way to configure and verify Windows clusters and to automatically fail over Oracle databases and applications.  In the event of a system failure, Oracle Fail Safe works with a Microsoft Failover Cluster to restart Oracle databases and applications on a surviving cluster node. With Oracle Fail Safe, you can monitor and fail over:

• Oracle databases (Standard and Enterprise Editions)
• Oracle Management Agent
• Other Oracle Applications

Oracle Fail Safe also enables flexible fail back when nodes are returned to service; planned failover for rolling cluster upgrades and workload balancing; and scripting of high availability tasks through its command line interface.  Oracle Fail Safe is maintained and enhanced for every release of the Oracle Database and it also keeps up with Microsoft releases. The latest version of Oracle Fail Safe works with both older and the newest 12c release of the Oracle Database.  Oracle Fail Safe is included with every Oracle Database license (including 12c) for Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012.

While Enterprise Manager does not directly manage or monitor Microsoft Failover Cluster, prior to EM 12.1, it could monitor Oracle targets in a Microsoft Cluster Environment when the EM Agent was properly configured and managed by Oracle Fail Safe. Without Oracle Fail Safe, EM cannot reliably manage any target that is part of a Microsoft cluster - for example: as far as EM is concerned a database will vanish and appear on different physical nodes rather than one target.  Beginning with version EM Cloud Control 12.1, the new agent deployment strategy prevents Oracle Fail Safe from being able to properly configure an agent in a Microsoft Failover Cluster environment.

What is the impact of the desupport?

Due to the fact that an EM Cloud Control Management Agent cannot be deployed in an Oracle Fail Safe environment, some resources including databases installed in a Microsoft Failover cluster environment, can no longer be manage targets starting with Enterprise Manager 12.1.

Actions

How can you manage your Oracle Fail Safe Environments and Microsoft Clustered Oracle Targets without EM Cloud Control?

Oracle Fail Safe, by itself does not require Enterprise Manager as it can be managed from a command-line or from the Fail Safe Manager GUI, which is completely independent of EM.  In place of Oracle Enterprise Manager,  customers can use either command-line interface or the Fail Safe Manager UI to manage their Oracle Fail Safe environments.

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