Robust maintenance processes and meticulous planning are needed to squeeze all planned downtime operations for EBS production systems to an absolute minimum.
Oracle is betting the future on Oracle Cloud services, with several unique initiatives in the IaaS & PaaS space for Oracle and Non Oracle workloads, that even Gartner’s leading analyst recognized in their latest report. Get the key insights here.
However migrating mission critical applications like EBS over public cloud is a strategic decision which needs to be executed with careful planning and any downtime during a migration can be an opportunity loss to you and gain for your competitors.
Various strategies to minimize downtime, which businesses can perform like rolling upgrades, create a clone database to offload instantiation and conversions, keep transactions in sync across the databases, manage partial or phased migrations and upgrades, conduct post upgrade/migration data verification, and implement a reliable fallback strategy.
The primary goal of this blog is to increase awareness of basics that minimizes downtime to near Zero, during a planned outage during upgrades and migrations.
How Zero Downtime Migration Works
Zero Downtime Migration uses a controlled switchover method for dynamically moving database services to the new database environment (either virtual machine or bare metal) in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Zero Downtime Migration uses Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to back up the source database to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage, creating a standby database (with Oracle Data Guard configuration, Oracle Data Guard Maximum Performance protection mode and asynchronous redo transport mode) in the target environment from the backup, synchronizes the source and target databases, and switches over to the target database as the primary database.
How to Achieve Zero Downtime Migration
Plan Your EBS Migration Lifecycle Well in Advance
Planning your EBS migration lifecycle well in advance will help you avoid roadblocks and also save time in pausing and taking decisions on the way. The cloud migration partners should share with you the best practices best practices learnt to enable a smooth migration. Read the Move and improve options you have for your EBS environment.
Engage a MSP/MSE Partner with Expertise in Migration Methodologies and Tools
Look out for Oracle certified Platinum partners which are cloud MSP/MSE certified capabilities. Over their migration sprints these partners would have built the right tools and proprietary scripts to expedite the migration reducing your downtime significantly. Work with a migration partner, who can not only migrate, but also has extended capabilities, to optimize and manage end-to-end Oracle roadmap for long term cloud success.
Ensure a Robust Connectivity from Onprem to Cloud
While there are various network options that you can choose like Fast connect, VPN, Internet Leased lines etc with your premises, the network setup amongst the various Infra components also requires expert skills to set up. Traffic can be routed through a Dynamic Routing Gateway (DRG) for private traffic. It is used with an IPSec VPN or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect connection to establish private connectivity between a VCN and an on-premises or other cloud network.
Significant Downtime During Off-Business Hours
Your migration partner who has resources onshore and offshore, can help you manage your migration task during off-business hours through offshore resources. This can reduce downtime during critical business hours but also can help you optimize costs as well.
Reduce the Migration Time with Archive and Purge
Database not required by legal/business should not be carried through to the new cloud platform. Implement a regular purge process including transient data as well as obsolete transactional data, purge old data before performing upgrades. This will eventually reduce time for migration and maintenance activities and save critical time and manpower cost. However significant inputs and discussion with business will definitely be on the cards.
Migrate Your Database along with EBS to IaaS
It is advisable to move your database along with EBS to OCI. However this is not mandatory. You may want to move your data from on-premises to a database system in the cloud, but you need a zero downtime solution with the ability to fallback. Oracle Zero Downtime Migration is Oracle’s preferred automated tool for migrating the same database type and version from on-premises to Oracle Cloud. It’s compliant with Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) and supports Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.4) and later database releases.
Keep your DR & Backups Enabled
Before you even begin your migration process, the best practice states to ensure your Disaster recovery is enabled and tested. This will give you a fallback in case an eventuality and protect from unexpected migration setbacks.
Conclusion
IT Convergence recognizes that your business can’t slow down when it’s time to migrate to a new O/S, database or hardware platform.
So, if you are an organisation with mission critical business applications, and you’re planning to move to Oracle EBS, we have built the right know-how, tools and methodologies that will genuinely offer a zero impact migration experience. How about minutes, rather than days?
That would be perfect.
