As I mentioned in a previous post, the brand-new OCM Companion Distribution is now available for download from My Oracle Support. One of the primary drivers for releasing this bundle is to make available a tool for mass deployment of the OCM collector software.
One of the most common issues that we've heard from customers is that OCM is a great concept, but the effort required to roll it out on any kind of enterprise scale is a bit too much. Consequently lots of customers would end up using it on a very small scale, not expanding beyond the test and validation phases. The Mass Deployment tool that's part of the Companion Distribution changes the game: using it, there's no longer such a heavy effort required for individual deployment of multiple OCMs. Instead, you can create a list of all the Oracle Homes that you want to push OCM into, kick off the tool, and let it do all the work across the entire enterprise.
Even better, the tool also has a status-checking mode. In other words, you can feed into it a list of homes and have it report back what the OCM situation is in each: these homes don't have OCM at all; these other homes have OCM software installed but unconfigured; this third set of homes have OCM up and running already (for example). Then you can take that output from the status mode and feed it back into the tool in deployment mode, instructing it to install plus configure the OCMs in the first category and configure those in the second category.
Since this is our first OCM mass deployment release, I encourage all users to give us your feedback on what you think of it, any features you like or dislike or wish it had...
