Surviving Disasters with F5 GTM and Oracle Enterprise Manager

Let's say you have 2 or more Data Centers, or locations where you run your applications.  MANs, WANs, Cloud whatever - You've architected diverse fiber routes, multipath IP routing, perhaps some Spanning Tree gobblygookness... and you feel confident that your network can handle an outage, right ?

So what about the mission critical Applications, Middleware, and Databases running ON TOP of all that fancy, expensive Disaster Recovery bundle of ca$$$h you and the CIO spent ?  Did you even test the failover ?  Failback ??  How many man-hours and dozens of scripts did it really take   ?  And more importantly, how much money could your company lose while everyone waits ??

Allow me to try and put your mind at ease, with some great Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c and F5 Networks solutions, and the soothing words of Maximum Availability Architecture Best Practices guidance.

We recently finished a hot-off-the-press MAA whitepaper that details how to use F5's Global Traffic Manager with EM12c to provide quick failover of your Data Center's Oracle Management Framework, the EM12c platform itself.  You see, it stands to reason, that if you are going to try and move Apps or Databases from one Data Center to another, you have to have a management platform that in and of itself is Highly Available - right ?  I mean, how do you even expect to handle the movement of apps and DBs, if your "management framework" is single site only, and that site now looks like something from the movie Twister ?  Of course, it could be any natural or man-made disaster, but the fiber-eating backhoe is my fave.

You need a fully HA EM12c environment to start with first, like the cornerstone of any solid DR/BC solution, the foundation has to be there first.

For more details on the different Level 1-4 architectures and descriptions, see the EM12c Framework docs, Part Number E24473-18.

But at Last, for Level 4, the best of the best:  after you set up Level 3 in each of your sites, you add GTM to your DNS system to quickly detect failures and route both EM agent and administrative access from one Data Center to the other. 

Where to find all this goodness?  The F5 Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Oracle MAA pages.

EM Level 3 HA Guide:  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/framework-infra/wp-em12c-config-oms-ha-bigip-1552459.pdf
EM Level 4 HA Guide:  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/availability/oms-dr-f5-big-ip-gtm-1880830.pdf

So if on some dark day you do end up with DataCenter-Twisted for your Primary site, GTM will route you to the Standby site, where EM12c is up and running and waiting to help you control the Apps, Middleware and Databases that are critical to your business.

And just in case you are wondering, it is rumored that F5 Networks gets its name from the F5 class tornado  ...