The most important part of migration process is the assessment of existing applications and the associated environment. This will allow you to create a risk list that can be used to identify any areas of the project that might require proof of concept to ensure that the project can be completed. The outcome of the assessment will be a risk list and a work breakdown structure that details the amount of effort required to migrate the application modules and the associated environment. The work breakdown structure can then used to create a plan and to schedule various activities.

During project execution, remember to allow sufficient time to follow Oracle recommended best practices as well as to time to re-architect some of the modules or to change the deployment strategy to get most from Oracle Linux. For custom, quickly evolving applications, it is important to freeze a snapshot of the application source code and associated infrastructure that can serve as a baseline for the migration activity.

The following sections discuss best practices that can greatly help in identifying the overall migration effort and potential areas of risk.