Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

Oracle10g Grid Computing with RAC
Chapter 9 -Managing and Using Oracle Grid Control

Grid Control 

With the advent and adoption of the Grid architecture, there will be too many resources to manage from a single point and many times there needs to be some kind of auto-managed mode with appropriate policies. As Grid relies upon clusters of low-cost, utility systems, the total number of hosts, clusters, databases, application servers and services deployed will be in large numbers. Traditionally managing these diverse resources have been cumbersome and expensive. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, rechristened as "Grid Control", provides an excellent choice to manage the Oracle Grid resources. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control has been significantly enhanced to enable true single system image management of cluster database deployments. Enterprise Manager's Cluster Database Page provides a single view of system status across multiple nodes. It also enables direct drill down to individual instances when needed.

Essentially Oracle's Grid Management depends on agents and remote access via ssh and other connection protocols like rsh. Each Server (Host), whether it is supporting a RAC Instance or stand-alone Oracle instance, has a Grid agent running on it. The Grid Agent scans and probes the server and its components and provides the target resources data back to the Grid repository in the form of XML data.

The Grid Control Management Server is a set of applications that allow access to all facets of the Oracle databases. From Grid Control (Management Server) you can do database startup, shut down, monitor, tune; perform import, export and backup and recovery. In addition you can manage patches, and, configure service groups as well as specify service level agreement parameters. Using Grid provisioning you can also automatically move applications onto and off of nodes to provide application level load balancing for your clusters. RAC is required by GRID in order to allow the auto provisioning and load balancing to occur. Thus the architecture of Grid Control Utility consists of Grid Management Server and Grid Agent residing on various hosts in the grid environment.