1. Migrate Siebel to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure by using Bring Your Own Image
  2. Learn About Migrating Siebel to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure by Using Bring Your Own Image

Learn About Migrating Siebel to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure by Using Bring Your Own Image

You can migrate and update a Siebel Enterprise by using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's Bring Your Own Image (BYOI) feature to bring your on-premises virtual machine image running Siebel to the cloud.

BYOI eliminates the need for a fresh implementation of Siebel in OCI, thereby meeting the customers where they are. Everything from on-premises virtual machine comes over to OCI as-is, reducing the overall effort and time.

Oracle Siebel has been revolutionizing the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) sector for more than two decades now. Amidst the tight competition in this space, Siebel is still considered The Complete CRM, offering CRM solutions to all verticals. Siebel on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has uplifted its overall capability. From saving cost to seamlessly integrating Siebel with the Oracle stack, the customers can leverage the power of Siebel on Oracle Cloud to empower their business.

This Solution Playbook focuses solely on Siebel’s middle-tier migration. While the BYOI feature can also migrate VMs that run Linux, the steps in this exercise are for a Windows.

Understand the Features and Capabilities of Siebel on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

A Siebel implementation on OCI provides you with many benefits, among them:

  • Lower total cost of ownership than deployments at on-premises or any other cloud platforms, based on Oracle's most recent customer-validated findings.
  • The new REST-based Continuous Deployment tool, Siebel Cloud Manager, automates the deployment of Siebel CRM on OCI's Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), containerizing the Siebel implementation.
  • No single point of failure.
  • You can migrate without needing to re-architect.
  • Rapid in-place technology refreshes, patching, and updates (the Siebel team now harnesses the CI/CD software development model).
  • Proactive costs and usage monitoring with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or Oracle Management Cloud and Siebel Templates.
  • Near-instant scaling up or down.
  • The ability to retain control over security and governance by using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tools or tools that you use in your current deployment.

Understand the On-Premises Requirements

To complete the exercises in this playbook, your on-premises Siebel CRM version must be IP 2017 or higher.

Expect These Outcomes

Once your migration to OCI is complete, you should see these results:

  • The Custom Image exported from on-premises will be used to create an instance in OCI.

    If you do not expect your on-premises VM and the one that will be created in OCI by using its custom image are not to be up and running at the same time, then you can use the same hostname of the on-premises VM for the VM on OCI. This is because the best practice is to maintain computers with different hostnames in the same domain.

  • To generalize the Siebel Windows, you'll need to run Sysprep (System Preparation).
  • Siebel will be updated to one of the latest versions.
  • The Siebel database and client must be upgraded to a certified version, although its migration process is out of the scope of this playbook. For certifications, visit My Oracle Support.

Understand the Siebel Reference Architecture

Siebel CRM can be deployed to OCI in varying flavors of architecture, ensuring:

  • High Availability
  • Security
  • Load Balancing
  • Disaster Recovery

The simplest secure and highly available Siebel architecture you can deploy on OCI is shown below.

Description of migrate-siebel-oci-byoi-arch.png follows
Description of the illustration migrate-siebel-oci-byoi-arch.png

migrate-siebel-oci-byoi-arch-oracle.zip

The main features of the above architecture are:
  1. Regional Subnets across ADs: Regional subnets span the entire region providing such benefits as protection from AD network failure, simplified Siebel service deployment and management. In this architecture bastion hosts, load balancers, and application tier servers in both ADs are in active state.
  2. Load-balancing across ADs: Public load balancing distributes traffic across the servers across all configured ADs, providing protection from an AD failure.
  3. Active-Active Siebel AI Server components across ADs: By clustering supported services across ADs you can get protection from any unforeseen failure in a single AD.
  4. Active-Active Siebel Server components across ADs: By clustering supported services across ADs you can get protection from any unforeseen failure in a single AD. GWY and Siebel File System are shown as Active-Passive across ADs.
  5. Database DR across Availability Domains: The use of either Data Guard or Active Data Guard is dependent on your use case and database edition. Active Data Guard requires Enterprise Edition – Extreme Performance.
This architecture contains these components:
  • Region

    An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, called availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them (across countries or even continents).

  • Availability domains

    Availability domains are standalone, independent data centers within a region. The physical resources in each availability domain are isolated from the resources in the other availability domains, which provides fault tolerance. Availability domains don’t share infrastructure such as power or cooling, or the internal availability domain network. So, a failure at one availability domain is unlikely to affect the other availability domains in the region.

  • Virtual cloud network (VCN) and subnets

    A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you complete control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple non-overlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which can be scoped to a region or to an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don't overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.

  • Bastion

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Bastion provides restricted and time-limited secure access to resources that don't have public endpoints and that require strict resource access controls, such as bare metal and virtual machines, Oracle MySQL Database Service, Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP), Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), and any other resource that allows Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) access. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Bastion service, you can enable access to private hosts without deploying and maintaining a jump host. In addition, you gain improved security posture with identity-based permissions and a centralized, audited, and time-bound SSH session. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Bastion removes the need for a public IP for bastion access, eliminating the hassle and potential attack surface when providing remote access.

  • Load balancer

    The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancing service provides automated traffic distribution from a single entry point to multiple servers in the back end. The load balancer provides access to different applications.

  • Dynamic routing gateway (DRG)

    The DRG is a virtual router that provides a path for private network traffic between a VCN and a network outside the region, such as a VCN in another Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region, an on-premises network, or a network in another cloud provider.

  • Siebel AI Server

    Siebel Application Interface (SAI) is a program that communicates with the Siebel Web Engine (which is part of an Application Object Manager component, such as Call Center Object Manager) on the Siebel Server and with browsers run by users of Siebel CRM.

  • Siebel Components

    A private subnet contains the Siebel App Server, Siebel Cloud Gateway, and the Siebel FS VM.

  • Primary and Standby Databases

    A primary database is the main database used by the Siebel application. A standby database is a database replica created from a backup of a primary database.

  • Data Guard

    A comprehensive set of services that create, maintain, manage, and monitor one or more standby databases to enable production Oracle databases to survive disasters and data corruptions

  • Object storage

    Object storage provides quick access to large amounts of structured and unstructured data of any content type, including database backups, analytic data, and rich content such as images and videos. You can safely and securely store and then retrieve data directly from the internet or from within the cloud platform. You can seamlessly scale storage without experiencing any degradation in performance or service reliability. Use standard storage for "hot" storage that you need to access quickly, immediately, and frequently. Use archive storage for "cold" storage that you retain for long periods of time and seldom or rarely access.

About Implementation Responsibilities

To implement this solution, you must have or assign the responsibilities outlined below: