Customers who have configured Delphix for provisioning Oracle Databases to their Non-Prod environments may come across situations where they want to migrate their Prod/DR Databases to set of brand new Servers. This may not be a common use case, but comes up as part of Data Center Migrations. Since Delphix is already in the mix, it is prudent not to disturb the non-prod Oracle ecosystem and have the continuity of Timeflows once the migration is complete.
Migration Process The Production Oracle Database Environment has Oracle Prod Database – P1 and its corresponding Oracle Physical Standby Database – S1. For Delphix, S1 is configured for ingesting the dSource and changes.
The following steps would help us to migrate this Production environment onto new set of hosts NH1 and NH2
1. Once all the Production Application processes are quiesced, first Detach S1 in Delphix using CLI steps well documented in Detach and Attach
2. Create a new Physical Standby Database – S2 on the new Host – NH1. This will be the new Standby Database for the Production Environment.
3. Perform Switchover to S2 using Oracle Data-guard.
4. Create another new Physical Standby P2 using S2 on the Host – NH2. This will be the new Primary Database for the Production Environment.
5. Execute Switchover to P2 using Oracle Data-guard.
6. Configure new Servers in Delphix Environment.
7. Reattach S2 back to Delphix using CLI steps well documented in Detach and Attach
During reattaching S2 back to Delphix, it can fail with the error complaining about the missing archive log files. The error would clearly provide the log sequence number information. One has to copy the missing archive logs to S2 and register it with the controlfile.
alter database register logfile <FULL-PATH-OF-ARCH-LOGFILE>;
Repeat the reattach step. Once Delphix finds all logs that were missing during the Switchover process, it will succeed with the relink step. This will ensure one can still use older Timeflows prior to migration to spin-off VDB’s.
Conclusion Delphix has been supporting Oracle Database Provisioning with ease and simplicity. Data Center Migrations are the best use case for this where Production Oracle Database Environments are migrated from one Data Center to another. This solution can be very well used in such cases and avoid disruptions to the Non-Production Application Life Cycle Developments.