4 Cloning Your Production Environment for Testing

Create a copy of your actual production environment, upgrade the cloned environment, verify that the upgraded components work as expected, and then (and only then) upgrade your production environment.

Cloning your production environment for testing is recommended, but not required.

Upgrades cannot be reversed. In most cases, if an error occurs, you must stop the upgrade and restore the entire environment from backup and begin the upgrade process from the beginning. Identifying potential upgrade issues in a development environment can eliminate unnecessary downtime.

Note:

It is beyond the scope of this document to describe the cloning procedures for all components and operating systems. Cloning procedures are component and operating system-specific. At a high level, you install the pre-upgrade version of your component domain on a test machine, create the required schemas using the Repository Creation Utility (RCU), and perform the upgrade.
Additional benefits of running an upgrade in a cloned production environment include the following:

  • Uncover and correct any upgrade issues.

  • Practice completing an end-to-end upgrade.

  • Understand the upgrade performance and how purge scripts can help.

  • Understand the time required to complete the upgrade.

  • Understand the database resource usage (such as temporary tablespace; PGA, and so on).

Note:

You can run the pre-upgrade Readiness Check on the cloned production environment to help identify potential upgrade issues with your data, but you must perform a complete test upgrade on a cloned environment to ensure a successful upgrade.

Cloning an Oracle GoldenGate Monitor Production Environment for Testing

Cloning an Oracle GoldenGate Monitor production environment is a two-part process.

  • Task 1: Clone (or copy) the existing production environment — referred to as A in the example below.

  • Task 2: Run the full upgrade on the cloned environment — referred to as B in the example below.

Task 1: Clone existing production environment (A) for upgrade validation.
  1. Install Oracle GoldenGate Monitor 11g or 12c version that matches the production Oracle GoldenGate Monitor instance version on the test machine.
    1. If your pre-upgrade environment is Oracle GoldenGate Monitor 11g Release 1, see the Installing Oracle Data Integrator in the Fusion Middleware Installation Guide for Oracle Data Integrator Guide.
  2. Run the Repository Creation Utility (RCU) from the production version you just installed, and create new Oracle GoldenGate Monitor repository schemas (B). You will want to perform testing on non-production schemas.

    Note:

    If you are cloning an Oracle GoldenGate Monitor 11g production environment:

    When you create a new repository using the RCU, you are required to enter a repository ID for both Master and Work. The defaults are 0=Master and 1=Work. Make sure that the new IDs are different that those used in the existing production repository to avoid ID conflicts during repository import in Step 6.

    This is not required if you are cloning an Oracle GoldenGate Monitor 12c production environment.

  3. If there are multiple work repositories, then you must create the other work repositories to match the production environment. See Creating a Work Repository in Oracle GoldenGate Monitor installation guide for your instance release.
  4. Purge the execution logs to avoid exporting and importing excessive data as part of work repository export/import in the following step. See Purging the Logs.
  5. Export Oracle GoldenGate Monitor master and work repository from the production system using Oracle GoldenGate Monitor export functionality. See Exporting and Importing the Master Repository in Developing Integration Projects with Oracle Data Integrator.
  6. Import the Oracle GoldenGate Monitor master and work repository exports into the newly created Oracle GoldenGate Monitor schemas.
Your test environment should now be a clone of your production Oracle GoldenGate Monitor environment.

Task 2: Upgrade the cloned environment (B) to test the upgrade

  1. Review the Pre-Upgrade Checklist to ensure that you have met all of the pre-upgrade requirements.

  2. Install Oracle GoldenGate Monitor 12c (12.2.1.3.0) and any other product distributions into a new Oracle home on the test machine. See Installing the Oracle Data Integrator Software in Installing and Configuring Oracle Data Integrator.

  3. Follow the standard upgrade procedures for your environment. Make sure that you select the appropriate upgrade procedures for your environment. See Introduction to Upgrading Oracle Data Integrator to 12c (12.2.1.3.0).

  4. Complete all post-upgrade configuration tasks and verify that the upgraded components work as expected.