Oracle Migration Case Study

Business Requirement

The customer wanted to migrate to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for its ability to retrieve faster queries and lower their cost of ownership. A summary of the requirement was to move from on-premises to Oracle as quickly as possible minimizing cost and risk.

Objective

The objective was to migrate the on-premises oracle database to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle offers the most comprehensive database migration services in the industry. However, the strategy for moving on-premises applications and their data to the cloud depends on your environment, customized configurations, and the applications that use data sources. We can migrate an on-premises Oracle database to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure by creating a backup of the on-premises database in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Database service.

Challenges

The challenges in migrating from On-premise to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are as below:

• Matching data types to Oracle Cloud data types
• Moving 100% of the data to Oracle Cloud and validating that all data has been moved successfully
• Performing these steps quickly, cheaply, and with 100% reliability

Risks Involved

The client wants to migrate the business to the cloud because of the high availability, scalability, and easy management of resources.

Migrating to the cloud is not a one-off decision. It has long-term and company-wide implications and therefore, the decision to move to the cloud should not be made in isolation.

Process Followed

1. The migration of the database involved research, testing, planning, deployment, and monitoring.

2. Research about the client’s infrastructure will be conducted on-premises environment.

3. Find out the best suitable environment in the client’s preferred cloud platform.

4. Provide information about other cloud platforms that would be suitable and cost-effective to the client.

5. The entire process will be under continuous monitoring to ensure the migration is going on smoothly.

Reasons to Migrate to Oracle Cloud

The customer faced numerous challenges while operating on on-premise infrastructure. Various challenges were faced while operating the server as well as while maintaining it, which forced the customer to decide migrating the business to an oracle infrastructure.

A few of the reasons for the decision are stated below:

1. Traffic spikes handling
2. Inability to scale server resources
3. Sudden demands for operations
4. High cost involved
5. Inefficient processes
6. The requirement for data storage
7. Geographical distribution challenge
8. Accessing application-related methods
9. Disaster recovery
10. Price of such inhouse disaster recovery processes

Pre-Requisites

1. Here are some factors that were considered during migration

1. 10.1.On-Premises Host details
2. 10.2.Database Size
3. 10.3.Network Bandwidth
4. 10.4.Database Name, version, edition, character set
5. 10.5.Downtime estimation and planning
6. 10.6.Performance analysis of infrastructure, database

2. Preparation of the back-out plan

Under any circumstances, if the client wishes to not go for the cloud, we will be ready with the back-out plans to implement at any phase of the migration.

3.The key tool

Terraform tool will be used for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform runs in a consistent and reliable environment, and includes easy access to shared state and secret data, access controls for approving changes to infrastructure, a private registry for sharing Terraform modules, detailed policy controls for governing the contents of Terraform configurations, and more.

Migration

The processes follow during a cloud migration on-premises environment vary based on factors such as the type of migration it wants to perform and the specific resources it wants to move. That said, common elements of a cloud migration strategy include the following:

Step 1

To migrate the on-premises environment we must create few services in Oracle Cloud.

Step 2

Using Terraform we will manage the following services:

1. 10.1.Users, groups, compartments, policies.
2. 10.2.Virtual Cloud Network, subnets, route tables, security lists
3. 10.3.Launching the compute instances
4. 10.4.Creating and adding block storage to the compute instance

Step 3

Start network Peering. We will peer the On-premises network with Oracle Cloud virtual cloud network.

Step 4

Using the RMAN active duplicate method we will build the standby in the compute instance.

Step 5

Announcing downtime. To perform the cut-over operation we must announce the downtime.

Step 6

Do fail-over operation to perform the role changes. The standby database (in OCI) will transform into the new primary database.

Step 7

Performance Monitoring of the entire stack (Infrastructure, DB, and Application) during the migration.

Post Migration

There are few steps to be taken post-migration to make sure there aren’t any unprecedented errors

• In case, any redo has not got shipped to the new primary database, we will ship those redo log files to make sure there is no data loss.
• We will enable the alarms and health checks for monitoring the services in the cloud.
• Verify the connectivity between the application and database and test the connectivity of applications from the public internet.
• Routing the incoming connections to the cloud environment.

Benefits after migration

The predominant benefits for migrating the on-premises environment to oracle cloud are:

• High Availability
• Highly Scalable (Horizontal and Vertical)
• Easy Resource Management

Final Results of migration

1.Cost-effective
2.Better work-life balance
3.Integration
4.Better storage
5.Disaster recovery
6.Flexibility
7.Mobility
8.Security
9.Faster setup
10.Less maintenance
11.Agility
12.Environment-friendly

About Banyan Data Services

Banyan Data focuses on Data Services, DevOps, and Cloud services to support enterprises of all sizes. With a team that possesses over two decades of experience, we help you choose the data technology and can provide consulting for your applications. With a team that possesses over two decades of infrastructure experience in hyper-growth systems, we can help customers of all sizes to design, architect, build, implement and monitor new applications on all public cloud platforms.