Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control is a cloud management offering.
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VMware Cloud Director
Score 9.9 out of 10
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VMware Cloud Director (formerly vCloud Director) is a cloud service-delivery platform used by cloud providers to operate and manage cloud-service businesses. The vendor states that by using VMware Cloud Director, cloud providers deliver secure, efficient, and elastic cloud resources to thousands of enterprises and IT teams across the world.
I wish I had an option to give it a 9.5 :) OEM Cloud Control is very well suited if you have a system with multiple implementations of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. If you are willing to pay for the huge license cost which is typical with Oracle, then you will love to use OEM Cloud Control to monitor your entire ERP solution including web servers, applications, network, storage, and physical servers. It is not worth the buck if your's is a small implementation. Your DBA's should be able to work without depending on OEM Cloud Control.
If you have a lot of customers that all need to have a separate place to work in, without the possibility of getting in each other way, and you want to safe yourself a lot of work. Than I strongly recommend you Cloud director. Ofcourse, only if you have a VMware environment as your working environment. If you just have a small group of customers and you can easily handle the work that's coming from it, then it is overkill to add cloud director to your environment. In a later station, you can always introduce cloud director (so tis never to late if you still want to use it)
Oracle Enterprise Manager is a "one stop shop" for all of our management needs. This is helpful because it minimizes the management of the management software itself. There are less upgrades and connectivity issues to handle. And there are "plug-ins" for additional products we use like Blue Medora's one for PostgreSQL.
Managing administrative jobs can be burdensome in a shop with dozens of servers and databases. OEM Cloud Control makes it easy since you can view all the jobs for all servers in one place. It is easy to filter on jobs with problems or the like so that you can quickly look at the logs and fix the issues.
Tuning PL/SQL is much easier using OEM Cloud Control. Most DBAs are familiar with trace files and TKPROF, but not having to do those things at a command line smooths the process out. The graphical interface makes it easier to show developers exactly what the issues are. This makes for less finger-pointing and quicker resolution of performance problems.
Proactive management is easier using OEM Cloud Control. Before having the gui, I had a collection of scripts that I would have to install on each database server, then set up cron jobs to run them. When Oracle was upgraded, those scripts might have to be updated on each and every server. OEM Cloud Control has those things built in. You can choose exactly which metrics are important to you. And you can keep performance graphs up all day on a second monitor to let you instantly see when something might cause a problem.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control can do a better job in actively managing (as opposed to monitoring) non-Oracle IT components including non-Oracle database, middleware, and storage.
The UI is less responsive and sometimes slow and the user experience could certainly be improved.
There is also an issue with positioning as other Oracle products sometimes come with their own versions of management console so it is hard to justify paying for Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control separately or as a new attachment.
The add-on/extension required on the internet browser sometimes are difficult to get working at first. We've experience instances where the add-on/extension latest versions will not work and have to downgrade to an older version.
The server console lacks features and tools. For example it would be useful to have a copy and paste tool or a file upload tool.
The vCloud Director management site uses Adobe Flash, which makes it impossible to use on a mobile device.
I wanted to give it a 10 but the heavily loaded solution makes it slow to load and refresh pages. Even bouncing the OEM Cloud Control takes around 10 mins which is quite long.
Since OEM Cloud Control comes free with Enterprise Edition, we have mostly worked on OEM Cloud Control. I did have my fair share of experience with DBArtisan. It's good and lighter than OEM Cloud Control. It sort of removes your need to even go to SQLPLUS command line most of the time. But it is way behind OEM Cloud Control in terms of features.
vCloud Director is definitely my favorite as far as cloud managers. The only thing that compares is Cisco UCS Director, but it has slightly different functionality and purpose. I understand why a lot of clients still go with vCloud Director even though VMware intends to sunset it
