Minimising Downtime with Oracle's Upgrade and Migration Solution

The technology upgrade project took place in an organisationally complex environment with significant business continuity criticalities. The project necessitated extensive process engineering to ensure its success.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (OEM) is a comprehensive management platform from Oracle that enables users to manage all their Oracle deployments through a unified dashboard, whether they are located in the cloud or on-premises in a data centre. Its intricate integration with the Oracle product stack makes it a leading solution that supports the automation and management of Oracle applications, databases, middleware, hardware, and engineered systems in the market.

The customer, a leading global banking group, has relied on OEMs for multiple years to oversee a vast array of Oracle databases, appliances, and third-party hardware that supports the databases. The customer’s infrastructure comprises over a thousand databases, including several hundred database clusters, roughly fifteen Exadata systems, and several dozen hosts operating on Windows, Linux, and Unix platforms.

OEM functionality is also responsible for delegating all backup and alarm management, in addition to the propagation of incidents to internal ticketing tools.

The primary reason that prompted the company to initiate the software upgrade process was the presence of system vulnerability issues. However, the company also took advantage of the opportunity to streamline and declutter its alarm system and workloads. This involved eliminating the layers of accumulated definitions that had complicated the maintenance management of OEM over time and had adversely affected its effectiveness.

To guarantee the migration’s success, the SCAI Group’s Oracle Competence Centre assembled a project team consisting of Technical Project Managers, Database Administrators, and System Administrators. This team collaborated with the customer’s stakeholders to provide comprehensive project management. The team was responsible for planning, testing, and executing the migration, in addition to communicating and managing action reports using the customer’s proprietary tools.

The project consisted of several stages, including:

Analysis and planning

Il team ha iniziato con l’analisi dell’ambiente OEM esistente, compresi l’hardware, il software e i punti di contatto con il mondo esterno. Sono state identificate le dipendenze tra i vari componenti ed è stata definita la strategia di migrazione ottimale. È stato definito e condiviso con tutti gli stakeholder un piano generale delle attività, identificando i rischi, le opportunità e le sfide associati alla migrazione.

The team started by examining the current OEM ecosystem, encompassing hardware, software, and external communication points. It subsequently identified dependencies among the different components and formulated the best migration strategy. A comprehensive action plan was devised and sent to all parties involved, outlining the potential risks, opportunities, and challenges of the migration process.

Design and implementation

The team created a new OEM environment and arranged the necessary hardware and software based on the analysis and planning stage. Thorough testing was performed on the new servers and databases to ensure that they met the final requirements, which included:

Minimising application downtime and ensuring data integrity.

Semi-automatic reporting to validate the correctness and completeness of the migrated data.

The presence of different OEM versions made it necessary to divide the activities into the following three project stages:

Application of the new OEM configuration layout to improve GDPR compliance, and reduction of complexity by normalising/standardising monitoring and jobs
The in-place upgrade of the OEM Repository to the latest version and upgrade of all related agents
Migration of agents attached to old OEM Repositories, including the migration of metrics and jobs

Execution and validation:

The project team carried out comprehensive and rigorous migration and upgrade tests, including rollback tests, to ensure a safe production release.

Simultaneously, in close collaboration with the customer, the project team oversaw the creation, updating, and distribution of release and rollback checklists, as well as communications to all parties involved.

The entire migration process took more than three months of operational work.

After the migration was completed, the new OEM environment yielded enhanced performance, scalability, and reliability, all while reducing the company’s operating expenses.

Documentation:

Special attention was paid to project documentation throughout the process. Specifically:

Detailed technical documentation was drawn up
Release checklists were devised and shared, with evidence of the checks carried out and timelines

SCAI Itec’s diligent efforts enabled the SCAI Group to attain Expertise Service: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c by fully achieving the project objectives within the designated timeframe and in strict compliance with the schedule.