1. Migrate Exalogic workloads to Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer and Oracle Private Cloud Appliance
  2. Learn About Migrating Oracle Exalogic Workloads

Learn About Migrating Oracle Exalogic Workloads

You can import virtual machine workloads from Oracle Exalogic to Oracle Private Cloud Appliance (PCA) and Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer using lift and shift migration.

Private Cloud Appliance and Compute Cloud@Customer are Oracle Engineered Systems designed for application tier workloads through delivery of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Private Cloud Appliance is an integrated hardware and software system that reduces infrastructure complexity and deployment time for virtualized workloads in private clouds. It is a complete platform for a wide range of application types and workloads, with built-in management, compute, storage and networking resources. Private Cloud Appliance provides excellent performance and other system properties for a broad range of applications.

Private Cloud Appliance is also available as Compute Cloud@Customer, a solution for an on-premises private cloud that includes Private Cloud Appliance and Oracle services. You can use Compute Cloud@Customer on a subscription basis, with Oracle operating the infrastructure so that you can focus on applications. Except where noted, Private Cloud Appliance will be used in this solution to describe either form of the product.

This solution describes how to migrate your applications to Private Cloud Appliance X9-2 and Compute Cloud@Customer, with an emphasis on Exalogic workloads, and the deployment methods and best practices. This solution emphasizes platform and performance characteristics of Private Cloud Appliance X9 and Compute Cloud@Customer over previous versions. The methodology and architectural principles apply to all versions as well as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Advantages of Using Private Cloud Appliance and Compute Cloud@Customer

The Private Cloud Appliance platform is ideal for both Oracle and third-party applications, with benefits especially suitable for Oracle WebLogic Fusion Middleware and similar application tier products. There are several reasons why this is so effective:
  • Provides quick-time-to-value for a robust virtualization platform, going from first power-up to starting VMs in a matter of hours. Automatically discover hardware components and configures them to work with one another, reducing design and administrative effort, eliminating potential errors, and speeding time to application deployment. The automated configuration implements Oracle best practices for optimal performance and availability.
  • Provides a high performance, high speed 100 GB Ethernet, Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS9-2, and Oracle X9-2 compute nodes (Oracle E5-2 on Compute Cloud@Customer), providing performance and scale improvements over previous product generations.
  • Eliminates single points of failure on management, network, storage, and compute resource, and permits 'zero-downtime' rolling upgrades to system infrastructure.
  • Provisons VM application instances quickly using pre-built Oracle platform images instead of having to build them from scratch. You can import and deploy custom built platform images into the system as needed.
  • Enables high performance, inter-VM networking using the Private Cloud Appliance internal networks to get low-latency, high bandwidth, private communications between VMs in a clustered application. This is especially useful for clustered applications like WebLogic and Coherence, and frameworks like Kubernetes. Multiple private networks based on VLANs or custom Private Cloud Appliance networks can provide independent isolated networks and are ideal for hosting multiple application clusters on the same Private Cloud Appliance. Each network carries traffic private to each cluster, without the need to prevent IP address collision or data leakage between applications.
  • Provide higher performance and automated recovery from outages with a load balancing service (LBaaS) and High Availability (HA) features of Private Cloud Appliance X9-2 and Compute Cloud@Customer provide. Uses three independent fault domains within each Private Cloud Appliance which allows applications to be distributed across these fault domains and restarted within a fault domain if resources are available.
  • Performs application orchestration and automated workload deployment with Terraform, the Oracle OCI API, and scriptable command line interfaces.
  • Supports heterogeneous computing on Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, other Linux distributions, and Windows. This increases operational efficiency and ROI by letting the same system platform be used for multiple workloads, instead of requiring separate ones.
  • Supports Oracle Linux Cloud Native Environment, including Oracle Container Runtime for Docker and Oracle Container Services for use with Kubernetes. They provide an ideal runtime for Oracle WebLogic Server applications to run in Docker and Kubernetes with full, integrated system support from Oracle.

    Tip:

    Oracle recommends that customers running Oracle WebLogic Server applications on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud systems and want to adopt cloud-native infrastructure and DevOps practices, migrate to Private Cloud Appliance and Compute Cloud@Customer.

Considerations for Migration Approach

Before you begin, consider your migration approach options. You can either perform a fresh OS install, or a lift and shift migration from Exalogic to Private Cloud Appliance (PCA).

The following diagram shows the Exalogic stack with Exalogic Control and InfiniBand optimizations.

Description of migrating-applications-exalogic-stack.png follows
Description of the illustration migrating-applications-exalogic-stack.png

You can migrate applications without change. Alternatively, you can use migration as an opportunity for an application and OS technical and hardware refresh by choosing a to do a fresh OS install.

Compare the environments while planning migrations and evaluate whether you want to create a new environment that closely matches the old one using the following information:

  • Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.6 and 12.1.3 versions are nearing end of life. New features such as updated REST support, JSON processing, auto-scaling and REST management in Oracle WebLogic Server 12.2.1.X enable better integration with cloud systems. Customers using prior versions should plan to migrate to 12.2.1.3 or later as part of the migration process.
  • The migration will change the underlying compute infrastructure used by applications.
  • Although Oracle Traffic Director (OTD) is supported for migration to Private Cloud Appliance, native Kubernetes load balancers such as Traefik and Voyager are more appropriate for Kubernetes, and recommended as replacements for Oracle Traffic Director. Simple load balancers can be implemented by using haproxy, which is included with Oracle Linux. Load Balancer-as-a-Service (LBaaS) will be the preferred native load balancer on Private Cloud Appliance X9-2 when available.
  • Access to external systems via HTTP and T3 protocol is supported, including access to databases, and Oracle RAC clusters running in Oracle Exadata Database Machine systems. SDP protocols are not supported on Private Cloud Appliance, so any existing usage of SDP within domains running on Exalogic cloud systems must be removed. This is consistent with current recommendations for applications running on Exalogic.
  • Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Coherence, and Oracle Application Development Framework are supported for use in Kubernetes with the WebLogic Kubernetes tools.
  • Oracle SuperCluster is a significantly different environment from Private Cloud Appliance, that requires additional planning to account for OS differences as well as underlying endian differences. You must build new VMs and install the Solarix X86 or Linux versions of your applications and migrate data via NFS.

Before You Begin

Before you begin your migration, learn about the definitions used in this solution playbook, check your license details, and review the product documentation for later reference.

Learn about platform images in the Private Cloud Appliance 3.0 release notes.

About Fresh OS Install

This method deploys new virtual machines containing Oracle WebLogic Server or other application software, and then migrate application contents (binaries, scripts, tools) from current instances.

You can also perform a fresh OS install to applications currently running on commodity servers. Consider a fresh OS install to gain the following benefits:

  • Performs a software technology refresh to complement the hardware technology refresh.
  • Permits a more significant transformation and modernization of the application environment, including the opportunity to modernize applications, run them inside Docker containers and use Kubernetes.

Private Cloud Appliance fully supports container-based application delivery using an Oracle Cloud-Native environment representing the modern trend for delivering application systems. To perform a fresh installation of the OS and application

  • The administrator must download and install the latest Oracle Linux OS and application versions from Oracle Software Delivery Network at Oracle Software Delivery Cloud.
  • Copy application data onto the newly installed OS.

The administrative steps are similar on Private Cloud Appliance as on any other platform.

Note:

Oracle recommends this method, which ensures an up-to-date software stack. However, this may require additional analysis to capture the current system's contents. Most users often prefer to move application environments to new hardware with as few changes as possible.

About the Terms Used in This Solution

Review the definitions of the terms used throughout this solution playbook.

  • The source system is the platform where the virtual machine is currently running, and the target is the Private Cloud Appliance system it will be moved to.
  • An instance is a virtual machine on Private Cloud Appliance. An instance has a lifecycle: it can be created, started (or launched), stopped, and terminated (removed from the PCA system). Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) uses the term instance instead of virtual machine because an instance could potentially be on bare metal. Private Cloud Appliance conforms to the same definition.
  • Every instance has a shape, which describes its CPU, memory, network and disk configuration. PCA has a list of standard shapes, described in the topic Choose a Private Cloud Appliance Shape.
  • An image is the template of a virtual disk, containing the operating system and preinstalled applications, plus descriptive metadata.
  • An instance is created by creating a boot volume from an image, and immediately launched. Other disks belonging to the instance are called block volumes and are created after the instance is launched.
  • Private Cloud Appliance provides platform images for Oracle Linux 7, Oracle Linux 8, and Oracle Solaris 11.4.
  • Custom images can be created from an instance running on Private Cloud Appliance, making it possible to use an image as the basis for cloned instances with customized contents.
  • Bring Your Own Image (BYOI) images are imported from a different platform.

About Bring Your Own Image (BYOI)

This solution focuses on BYOI using a lift and shift approach in which an OS instance is moved to Private Cloud Appliance with as few OS and configuration changes as possible.

Another approach is to create entirely new images based on the latest version of the desired operating system and application software. Use this when you want to perform a technology refresh and modernize the entire hardware and software stack. Both approaches are valid and widely used, depending on your business and technical needs.

See the Bring Your Own Image (BYOI) section in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation to learn more.

About Required Products, Services, and Roles

This solution requires one or more of the following products and services:

  • Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X9-2

    Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer

  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

These are the roles needed for each product or service.

Product Name: Role Required to...
Oracle Private Cloud Appliance: Compute Enclave Create network, compute, and storage constructs.
Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer: Administrators Access Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer Console, CLI, and APIs.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: Administrators Access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console, CLI, and APIs.

See Oracle Products, Solutions, and Services to get what you need.