Oracle E-Business Suite migration might be homogeneous or heterogeneous, depending on the source operating system (OS) that you are migrating from. The heterogeneous migrations of Oracle E-Business Suite are those in which the Endian formats for the source and target OS differ.

Migration Approaches

Customers’ migration paths are depicted in the diagram below, based on the existing platform, tooling, and experiences offered to them.

Migrating Oracle E-Business Suite to the same OS

Oracle E-Business Suite migration using Rapid Clone and Smart Clone (homogeneous – same OS). Here is how to migrate using either scenario.

1. Migration using Rapid Clone:

If the source and target OS for Oracle E-Business Suite migration are the same, you can make use of the Oracle Rapid Clone tool to migrate their database to AWS.

2. Migration using Smart Clone:

The Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite also allows you to use the Oracle Smart Clone technique to automatically clone an Oracle E-Business Suite system. Smart Clone requires that the target Oracle E-Business Suite database be cloned and detected in Enterprise Manager as a requirement. Smart Clone uses the found target database as an input to configure a database target before cloning the source instance’s apps tier. It then applies it to the Oracle E-Business Suite system in question.

Migrating for Oracle E-Business Suite across OS (using the same Endian format)

For some clients, the source and target platforms may be little endian, but the operating systems may be different. Cloning programs like Rapid Clone and Smart Clone can’t be used in these situations. This would be referred to as a “platform” migration. You can still use Oracle database technologies like Oracle RMAN, Oracle Data Guard, and Oracle Transportable under these situations. Tablespaces are great for storage, but you’ll need to use the Rapid Install software to create a new application tier and configure it as a target.

Because the process is essentially one of copying database files and then utilizing Recovery Manager (RMAN) to convert data files, Transportable Database is the fastest approach to migrate data between two systems (using the RMAN convert database command). The source and target databases must, however, be of the same release and patch set version for the E-Business Suite Transportable Databases migration process to work.

Migrating Oracle E-Business Suite across platforms (different Endian formats)

Cross platform migration of Oracle E-Business Suite involves a two-step approach to migrate the database tier and the application tier. To migrate the application tier, you would have to use rapidwiz to create the techstack and copy certain APPL_TOP & COMMON_TOP directories. And also to generate and upload customer specific manifest files to My Oracle Support and apply the supplied patches.
For database migration, Transportable Tablespaces is an Oracle database feature that allows you to move large amounts of data from one database to another more quickly, regardless of the source or target OS. The Cross-Platform Transportable Tablespaces (XTTS) feature allows you to distribute data and migrate databases across platforms with different endian (byte-ordering) formats. This migration approach is best suited for very big databases when metadata is relatively modest in comparison to the data.

Benefits of hosting Oracle E-Business Suite on AWS?

Customers can gain all of the benefits of a mature cloud platform (such as cost savings, performance improvements, and higher availability) without making large upfront investments by migrating Oracle E-Business Suite to AWS. Oracle customers enjoy choice, flexibility, and cost management with over 200 AWS Cloud services.

Migration Considerations

1. Edge applications – AWS Application Discovery Service or TSO Logic, for example, can provide relevant information on applications and systems that interact with Oracle E-Business Suite. Examine the edge applications to see if they should be moved to the cloud initially or later. This will also assist you in calculating the impact of moving to Oracle E-Business Suite.

2. Current System Utilization – Check the current utilization of Oracle E-Business Suite application servers, database servers, and concurrent processing servers. Over the course of a few weeks, utilization must be monitored, noting peak periods for input/output (I/O) and database throughput capacity. This information can be obtained utilizing various monitoring systems currently in place inside your firm. Discovery tools like AWS Application Discovery Service or Migration Evaluator can provide data on current system use and suitable instance sizing on AWS as part of a migration effort.

3. Target instance types – To support the real-time and batch workloads, create a database instance for the I/O and throughput that you saw on-premises.

4. Downtime – After the migration and setup are complete, you must arrange for a downtime to cutover to the new production instance. You can utilize a variety of methods to reduce downtime, which are covered in the following sections.

5. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) /Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – As you shift to the cloud, you can strengthen your current service level agreements (SLAs). For high availability, AWS recommends running the Oracle E-Business Suite production system across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) inside the AWS Region (HA). Each Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance in an Availability Zone provides 99.99 percent infrastructure availability. You can also have a multi-Regional disaster recovery setup based on your needs (DR).

6. RAC vs. non-RAC – You might be using Oracle Real Application Clusters to run your current production databases for Oracle E-Business Suite (Oracle RAC). While RAC improves availability and throughput, you can achieve a similar degree of performance and availability without RAC on AWS by leveraging appropriate AWS services and additional Oracle HA solutions like Oracle Data Guard. Consider the total CPU, memory, and throughput values from all RAC instances when sizing database nodes on AWS.

7. Homogeneous vs. heterogeneous migration – Oracle E-Business Suite migration can be homogeneous or heterogeneous, depending on the source operating system (OS) you’re migrating from. To determine your migration type, look at the table below. The heterogeneous migrations of Oracle E-Business Suite are those in which the Endian formats for the source and target OS differ. Heterogeneous migrations are more difficult since only a limited number of tools are available for migration, and comprehensive testing is required.

To learn more about these methods and to take your first step towards moving your E-Business Suite to AWS Cloud, reach out to us at sales@ibizsoftinc.com