I am seeing a trend in the way that marketing and engineering is bundling management packs together. Last year they did a bulk discount if you purchased three or more packs. This year they are bundling some of the common features into system and services offerings. For example, included in the Unbreakable Linux offering is the Provisioning, Configuration, and Host Management packs. These are provided free of charge if you pay for Basic and Premium support level packaging. It looks like somthing similar is being done for the E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and Siebel Management packs. The bundled application suites included the Configuration, Service Level Management, and Performance packs.
I personally like this bundling of functionality. The next thing that I think is needed is a bundling with something like Remedy, openSNMP, and an SMS service to tie help desk tickets, real time reporting, and paging into one service.
status update on the database installations….. I got mySQL installed on Windows this weekend. It was a trivial install. I struggled getting it installed on RHEL4 because I tried installing it via rpm packages. I had substantially more luck getting it working with tar.gz distributions. I was able to successfuly integrate SQL Developer with the mySQL deployment and see tables and views just like with an Oracle XE installation. The mySQL distribution on Linux includes a installation wizard but once it said that it was finished I could not find the binaries like mysqld to start the database and could not figure out what port it was default configured to listen on. Using the tar.gz distribution, I was able to start, configure, and connect to the database according to the documentation. It looks like they are diverging how to install and configure this software package and the two methods are substantially out of sync with the documentation.