Step-by-Step Guide to Oracle EBS to Cloud Migration

Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is one of the major product lines offered by Oracle, an integrated set of applications that help organizations manage the complexities of their global business environment. Alongside Oracle Fusion Cloud applications, Oracle EBS provides organizations with a comprehensive suite of solutions for managing business processes. It provides automation and enhancement for core business processes related to different industries and regions, across different functions, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), including Finance, Human Resources, Supply Chain management, Customer Relationship Management, and Project Management. With its modular architecture, Oracle EBS is designed to support different business functions, modules, and features.

Migrating to the Cloud

Oracle E-Business Suite has been deployed traditionally on premises, requiring hardware, infrastructure management, and its upgrades. As businesses are increasingly looking to move to the cloud for efficiency and flexibility, they choose to migrate their existing Oracle E Business Suite on-premises to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) without requiring major configuration, integration, or business process changes. This shift enables organizations to keep their existing E-Business Suite without disrupting business operations, while gaining the cost and operational benefits of cloud or using a hybrid approach, keeping some operations on-premises and others in the cloud.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Benefits

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is designed to support workloads like Oracle E-Business Suite by offering several benefits over on-premises deployments and other cloud service providers.

• OCI is designed to provide simpler migration of all applications with web-based tools like Oracle Cloud Manager, which provisions new environments and streamlines the migration of existing EBS environments’ lifecycle management.
• Oracle Cloud Manager offers automation capabilities, reducing manual tasks such as backups and patching, simplifying management, and freeing up the IT teams to focus on more important tasks.
• Migrating Oracle EBS to cloud provides performance improvements for Oracle E-Business Suite. Studies show a 30% increase in performance and up to 10% increase in reporting.
• OCI provides high availability with recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) according to the requirements of an organization.
• OCI offers multi-layered security features such as isolated network virtualization and advanced threat detection to protect sensitive data.
• Moving to OCI can result in cost reductions, reducing the requirement for upfront hardware investment, ongoing maintenance, and operational costs.
• OCI can lower the total cost of ownership by 30% or more in comparison to on-premises deployments and 44% lower than other cloud providers with respect to high-performance computing (HPC).
• OCI’s pay-as-you-go model offers more predictability and optimization as businesses only pay what they consume, shifting to operational expenditure (OpEx) from capital expenditure (CapEx) for higher flexibility.

E-Business Suite on OCI Use Cases

Running Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers numerous advantages for organizations, extending beyond a basic “lift and shift” migration. By migrating to their environments, they can use the cloud’s innovation, flexibility, and new features.

Explore New Modules and Functionalities

Oracle Cloud Marketplace offers pre-built demo installation images for Oracle E-Business Suite, allowing you to test the latest release, 12.2.14. These images enable organizations to create a single-node instance of EBS with demonstration data as part of new modules evaluation or users’ training on new features. This process can be completed with a few clicks, provisioning a virtual machine that includes a database, an application, and the Enterprise Command Center (ECC). Organizations can evaluate the new functions and features of the latest EBS releases and Enterprise Command Center V14, which offers 36 different command centers with 165 role-based dashboards to help users with key transactions without risking their production environment.

Easily Deploy Development and Test Environments

OCI enables organizations to create new test and development environments for customization testing, ensuring their existing environment operation is not disturbed, allowing cloning of their on-premises environments in the cloud. OCI also provides tools used for customization in on-premises environments, as well as testing and validation of patches, with the flexibility to scale infrastructure up or down, giving cost optimization with a pay-as-you-go model. This means environments can be created, used for specific testing and validation of patches before deploying them in the production environment, and then decommissioned. With these test and development environments, OCI can also be used for testing cloud native technologies and frameworks, such as setting up containers and using Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Deployment (CD) for DevOps practices, such as custom code, automating the build, testing, and deployment.

Optimize Business-Critical Production Workloads

Organizations can gain industry-leading price performances, such as cost savings with its known high-performance compute, reduced total cost of ownership in comparison to on-premises setups or other cloud offerings, and automatic scalability. OCI is designed to eliminate single points of failure with its high-availability cloud structure, ensuring maximum uptime using the deployment of EBS across regions and multiple availability domains. If one data center fails in an area, it will not affect the application availability. As the cloud services data centers also require maintenance and hardware failures, OCI offers fault domains that are logical groupings of hardware within an availability domain. Distributing application instances across different fault domains protects against maintenance and hardware failures within a single rack. OCI provides load balancer functionality deployed across multiple application servers for traffic distribution. OCI also provides redundancy, scalability, and high availability for databases with its Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) feature, to run databases on multiple servers.

DBackup and Disaster Recovery

OCI offers built-in automated backup and disaster recovery solutions for EBS environments, ensuring business continuity in the event of a disaster. OCI Object storage services are designed to provide security and high availability, and can be used to create a shared file system for EBS applications, including snapshot functionality for backups. OCI provides automation of backup, recovery, and archiving files with EBS Cloud Manager, along with other lifecycle management tasks. For a more advanced disaster recovery, OCI provides Full Stack Disaster Recovery, which can orchestrate applications, databases, and infrastructure transition between OCI regions with a single click, reducing the RTO and RPO significantly.

Oracle E-Business Suite on OCI: Flexible Deployment Options

Organizations can choose from several deployment models according to their requirements, performance, management, and scalability needs when deploying Oracle EBS on OCI. These models range from a simple, all-in-one virtual machine for testing or evaluation to a multi-node architecture for production workloads.

Single Node on Compute Model

This is the most basic deployment model for EBS on OCI, designed for simplicity and provisioning demo environments.

• Architecture: Both application tiers, including web server and application server, and the Oracle database tier, are installed on a single virtual machine using an OCI compute, simplifying network configuration and resource management.
• Ideal Use Cases: This architecture is designed for simplicity and suits non-production environments such as demonstration systems, sandboxes for experimentation, conducting training, or evaluating new functionalities.
• Provisioning: Oracle provides a pre-built demo install image on Oracle Cloud Marketplace for provisioning a single-node environment with pre-defined demonstration data. Users can select this image, compute, and network configuration, and launch in a short amount of time.

Multi-Node on Compute Model

A more traditional and common multi-node deployment model on compute for flexibility and scalability.

• Architecture: This model provides flexibility of separation between the application tier and the database tier, both running on separate OCI compute VMs, enabling organizations to deploy multiple applications to manage a large user base for load balancing using the OCI load balancer.
• Ideal Use Cases: This multi-node model is suitable for organizations’ requirements where they want to deploy test, staging, and development environments close to their production environments, or for small organizations requiring moderate performance and availability.

Multi-Node on Compute and Database Service Model

This is an advanced and commonly used architecture for running EBS production workloads on OCI, offering flexibility and compute VMs for applications, as well as managed database as a service (DBaaS) for databases.

• Architecture: Oracle E-Business Suite applications can be deployed on multiple compute VMs, but the database is deployed and managed by Oracle database services, such as:
  • Oracle base database service: a managed database service running on separate VMs.
  • Oracle Exadata database service, which provides the highest performance level, scalability, and high availability for the database on Exadata infrastructure.
  • Oracle Autonomous database service, which uses machine learning to automate database management such as tuning, security, and updates, reducing administrative overhead.

• Ideal Use Cases: This is a recommended architecture model for mission-critical production workload requiring high availability, extreme performance, scalability, and manageability, which is delivered by Oracle Exadata service and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).

• Adoption: This is the most widely adopted model for Oracle E-Business Suite customers migrating to OCI. They can use the combination of compute for the application and a database cloud service for the database. This model provides balanced control, performance, high availability, and automated management.

How to Migrate to OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

Oracle EBS to Cloud migration is a smooth and seamless process, designed to move on-premises environments to the cloud with minimized business operation disturbance by comprehensive tools, services, and guidelines offered by OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure).

Migration Simplicity

One of the core benefits of OCI is providing migration simplicity without significant configuration, integration, or changes in business processes. It enables organizations to keep their existing third-party integrations, custom code, and user experience, and reduces the complexity attached to cloud migrations. The primary focus is on moving the existing EBS environment to a more dependable, flexible, and improved performance with lower cost, while keeping the business continuity intact.

Oracle E-Business Suite Cloud Manager

Oracle EBS Cloud Manager is a part of the migration strategy to OCI. It is a web-based automation tool, exclusively available on OCI, which orchestrates the main migration flow of EBS on OCI. EBS Cloud Manager is used to simplify the complex tasks EBS administrators do daily. It is deployed as a virtual machine within the customer’s environment, which provides a GUI to manage the whole EBS environment.

Functions of Oracle E-Business Suite Cloud Manager

Cloud Manager is used for automation of several critical functions, such as:

• Cloud Manager is used to provision new single-node environments for demo or testing and provisions advanced, complex, and multi-node systems for development, testing, or production.
• Cloud Manager also speeds up and simplifies the migration process of on-premises EBS instances to OCI by creating a backup of existing cases, data migration, configuration, and provisioning of a new environment in the cloud.
• Cloud Manager can also be used to manage several EBS lifecycle management tasks once the environment is created on OCI. This includes making backups, cloning of environments, adding or removing nodes, scaling, patching, and setting up and managing disaster recovery.

Deployment

Oracle EBS Cloud Manager can be deployed using a pre-built image from Oracle Marketplace. The process involves creating and launching a compute instance within an already configured network in the organization’s cloud tenant. It serves as a control center for EBS operations in the cloud.

Oracle Cloud Lift Services

Oracle offers a unique program to help customers with their EBS-to-cloud migration process. These services are called Oracle Cloud Lift Services, providing customers with a dedicated team of Oracle cloud technical experts and engineers at no added cost to existing and new customers to speed up their migration to OCI. The scope of this program encompasses the complete migration process, from planning stages to going live, including solution architecture design, hands-on migration, performance analysis, and assistance with business case development. The primary focus of these services is to migrate the environments in weeks instead of taking months, with a smooth transition, training of the staff, best practices, and running operations after migration.

Resources

Oracle offers several resources to help organizations learn how to migrate their EBS on-premises environments to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, including guidelines, step-by-step instructions, workshops, and real-world case studies.

Case Study of Minor Hotels

Minor Hotels is a chain of hotels spanning internationally in over 55 countries. They have migrated their critical EBS applications to Oracle Cloud infrastructure using Oracle Cloud Manager to improve their business continuity, reduce their RTO and RPO timeline from 24 hours to just 2 hours, and also achieved enhanced operational efficiency. You can further read about this case study here: Minor Hotels EBS Migration

Workshops by Oracle

Oracle conducts hands-on workshops that give practical experience of the migration process to IT teams managing EBS instances. These workshops enable professionals to use Oracle EBS Cloud Manager in a controlled environment to create new environments, clone them, or migrate EBS environments to build technical skills and confidence: Oracle Live Labs, All Workshops

Guides by Oracle

Oracle provides detailed guides outlining the recommended procedures, architectures, and best practices for EBS to OCI migration, including learning how to leverage OCI services, creating new EBS instances, migrating EBS to OCI, managing the EBS lifecycle on OCI, configuring EBS Cloud Manager, and running data centers with Exadata Cloud. Here is the guide with several links to different topics in the above categories: Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Cloud

Information by Oracle

Oracle’s website provides extensive information about their Cloud Lift Services, explaining the scope of assistance, eligibility requirements, customer success stories, benefits, and how to get them engaged to speed up your EBS to cloud migration: Oracle Cloud Lift Services

Features of EBS on OCI

Superior Performance and TCO

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides the following financial and technical features, along with performance gain and cost efficiencies.

• Migrating EBS to OCI provides a total cost of ownership reduced by 30% or as compared to on-premises EBS, by cutting the significant upfront expenses on hardware and operational costs such as data center space and power costs.
• OCI is designed to support complex enterprise-level EBS workloads with its underutilized network and computing resources.
• OCI provides unique support advantages as a single vendor for both the EBS application and cloud infrastructure that are closely integrated and optimized, including testing, certification, and automation features that are not available anywhere else.
• OCI offers higher performance through its compute, storage, such as NVMe SSDs, networking infrastructure, and managed database instances and services for quick transaction processing, report generation, and application responsiveness.
• OCI provides maximum performance and high availability for EBS with its Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Exadata database services, which are only available on OCI.

On top of that, Oracle provides comprehensive resources, such as cloud economics for understanding the financial advantages of moving to the cloud, case studies showing organizations cutting costs and improving their performance by 30%, and a comparison of organizations finalizing OCI over AWS for better performance, cost reduction, and a single vendor support model. Below are some of the links for those resources and case studies.

Case Studies by Oracle

• Cloud Economics
• Case Study: Dar Al Dawa, a pharmaceutical manufacturing company migration to OCI
• Case Study: Abu Dhabi National Energy Company TAQA migration to OCI
• Why organizations select OCI over AWS

Integration Services

OCI provides integration services for EBS to connect with other on-premises applications, automate end-to-end processes, data sources, and other clouds. These services include.

• Prebuilt adapters for several SaaS and on-premises applications for simplified integration processes, and low-code customization for integration development and deployment.
• Developers can use these tools to connect SaaS, EBS, and other applications six times faster than traditional coding methods.
• Oracle integration services give you access to Oracle SaaS applications such as Oracle Cloud ERP, Oracle HCM, and Oracle SCM via Oracle Customer Experience (Oracle CX).

Below are some OCI resources you can use to learn more about integration services, use cases, case studies, and workshops.

• Use Case: Connect EBS with Financials Cloud[EV2]
• Case Study: NRMA’s success with Oracle Integration and EBS on OCI
• Information: Learn about integration services
• Workshop: Get started with Oracle Integration

Built-in Security

• OCI provides a full stack of security services to secure EBS environments on every layer, such as infrastructure, application, and data.
• Oracle has partnered with leading network security appliance vendors like Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, and Cisco with validated architecture for OCI.
• OCI offers Oracle Autonomous Database, which provides self-patching for the most important EBS component database, automation of security updates, and key security tasks to keep security policies up to date.
• OCI provides isolated network virtualization to protect against cross-tenant attacks and a hardware root trust to ensure the bare metal instances or data centers are secure, along with default encryption for data in transit or at rest.
• OCI provides services like Oracle Cloud Guard for continuous monitoring of security misconfigurations and remediation, and Oracle Security Zones service for enforcing strong security policies on cloud resources within specific compartments, for ensuring compliance with security best practices.
• OCI uses Oracle Identity and Access Management to provide centralized role-based access control to make sure that users only access the resources necessary for their job functions.

Oracle provides comprehensive guides, case studies, and learning materials on OCI’s cloud security services. Some of the resources are as follows:

Case Study by Oracle

Case Study: HNI modernizes enterprise identity with EBS on OCI.

Guides by Oracle

• Secure EBS workloads with Fortinet
• Palo Alto Networks VM Series Firewall
• Check Point Cloud Guard Network Security
• Cisco Threat Defense

Information

Learn about cloud security services.

Complete Support for Hybrid and Multi-cloud Strategies

OCI is designed to manage complex enterprise IT goals, which may involve connectivity to multiple cloud providers and on-premises systems, by offering the following features:

• OCI offers public cloud services within customer data centers in their dedicated region for their hybrid requirements.
• Being an open platform ecosystem, OCI supports multi-cloud connectivity options to connect to different cloud service providers.
• Oracle provides a pre-configured, low-latency private connection between OCI and Microsoft Azure to enable customers to use the best of both platforms, such as running EBS on OCI and identity services on Azure Active Directory, or running an Oracle database on Microsoft Azure.
• OCI offers low data egress charges, which makes it more cost-effective for moving data between different clouds and to or from on-premises environments.

Oracle provides comprehensive learning resources, case studies, and guides on hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. Below are some valuable resources:

• Case Study: Integra Life Sciences OCI multicloud solutions
• Guide: Set up SSO between Azure Active Directory and Oracle Identity Cloud Service.
• Information: Learn about interconnecting OCI, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud solutions.

Smarter Apps

• Oracle offers a complete digital assistant powered by AI services for Oracle E-Business Suite, which allows organizations to create conversational interfaces such as chatbots to access the EBS environment.
• This AI assistant enables organizations to provide 24/7 access for users to automate tasks like approval routes and manage frequently asked questions, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks.
• Oracle digital assistant can be used to automate other processes such as managing the accounts payable close, handling invoice inquiries, creating purchase requisitions or shipment tracking, and more.

You can learn more about Oracle Digital Assistant by following this link: Oracle Digital Assistant

Insights and Visualizations

• Organizations can gain valuable insights from their EBS environment and other applications using powerful analytics services offered by OCI, a cloud native service covering and simplifying the complete analytical workflow.
• This service covers the entire analytics process, such as data ingestion from different sources, data preparation, data modeling, enrichment, and provides visualization and collaboration tools.
• Machine learning and natural language processing are embedded technologies that enable organizations to increase productivity and create an analytics-driven culture.

Learn more about Oracle Analytics by following the links:

Prebuilt, self-service data analytics for EBS

Workshops: Oracle Analytics Cloud

Running Oracle E-Business Suite on OCI: Sizing Examples

When migrating Oracle EBS or deploying a new environment of Oracle EBS on OCI, it is critical to consider sizing, because the correct configuration depends on the number of concurrent users, the intensity of workload, specific modules, transaction volumes, and performance expectations.

While Oracle offers flexible reference infrastructure options aligned with compute, networking, and storage resources according to different organizational needs, the best configuration can differ for each organization.

User Tiers

Oracle provides guidelines for customer environments based on user count as a starting point for the allocation of resources. Still, the actual requirements can always be workload-based.

Below are three example user tiers for sizing.

• 1,000 Users: Small to Mid-sized businesses may require a multi-node architecture with two or more application servers and a database service. High availability is also possible.
• 3,000 Users: Medium to large organizations may require multiple application servers with high availability in different availability domains, possibly using Oracle RAC service for database high availability.
• 5,000 Users: Large to extra-large enterprises may require scalable and highly available architecture, such as multiple application servers behind load balancers, across different availability domains. The database tier may require high performance via Exadata database service.

Example Cost Breakdown

The following table provides an annual cost breakdown for the different user tiers mentioned above. Please note that these examples are based on general guidelines. For a detailed analysis of workloads and proper sizing, use any estimator tools provided by Oracle or contact their sales team.

Service Name	Quantity (1,000 Users)	Cost (1,000 Users)	Cost (1,000 Users)	Cost (3,000 Users)	Quantity (5,000 Users)	Cost (5,000 Users)
OCI – Load Balancer Base	1.0 (LBH)	$0	1.0 (LBH)	$0	1.0 (LBH)	$0
OCI – Object Storage – Storage	5000.0 (GB)	$1,530	15000.0 (GB)	$4,590	2,550,000.0 (GB)	$780,300
OCI – Block Volume	23172.0 (GB)	$7,091	51010.0 (GB)	$15,609	100.0 (GB)	$31
OCI – Compute – Standard – E4	14.0 (OCPU)	$3,125	16.0 (OCPU)	$3,571	–	–
Oracle Base Database Service – Enterprise – E4 Flex	12.0 (OCPU)	$46,079	31.0 (OCPU)	$119,038	–	–
OCI – Block Volume Performance	10.0 (VPU)	$2,353	10.0 (VPU)	$8,356	–	–
OCI – Network	3.0 (GB/Month)	$0	3.0 (GB/Month)	$0	2.0 (GB/Month)	$0
OCI – 100 Mbps Load Balancer	1.0 (LBH)	$190	–	–	–	–
OCI – Load Balancer Bandwidth	10.0 (Mbps/Hour)	$0	10.0 (Mbps/Hour)	$0	10.0 (Mbps/Hour)	$0
OCI – File Storage	500.0 (GB)	$1,800	500.0 (GB)	$1,800	500.0 (GB)	$1,800
OCI – Compute – Standard – E4 – Memory	146.0 (GB)	$1,955	220.0 (GB)	$2,946	–	–
Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M – Database Servers	–	–	–	–	19.0 (Server)	$492,476
Over 10 TB/month	–	–	–	–	200,000.0 (GB/Month)	$19,380
OCI – Bare Metal Dense I/O 2.52	–	–	–	–	52.0 (OCPU)	$59,193
Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M – Storage Cells	–	–	–	–	27.0 (Cell)	$699,840
OCI – Virtual Machine Dense I/O 2.16	–	–	–	–	16.0 (OCPU)	$18,213
Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M – Quarter Rack	–	–	–	–	1.0 (Rack)	$129,601
Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M – Additional OCPUs	–	–	–	–	28.0 (OCPU)	$336,003
Total Annual Cost		$64,123		$155,910		$2,536,837

Four-Step Migration to OCI with Oracle E-Business Suite Cloud Manager

Migration of the EBS environment from on-premises to OCI is a structured process. It involves the EBS Cloud Manager automation process to simplify the migration of existing applications, ensuring that customization, data, and integrations are moved without requiring complete re-engineering. This migration process is divided into four important phases: Plan, Prepare, Execute, and Validate.

Step 1: Plan

The planning phase involves evaluating your existing environment, such as defining roles and responsibilities for the cloud migration project.

• EBS Cloud Manager is designed to support specific E-Business Suite releases. Before starting, confirm that your on-premises environment is running on a certified release, such as EBS release 12.1.3, 12.2.3, or later. If not, you must first upgrade your environment to a supported release.
• Identifying and defining clear user roles for separation of duties to maintain operational integrity and security is a crucial part of the planning phase. Key roles to be assigned are as follows:
• Tenant Administrator to manage overall OCI account and identity and access management.
• Network Administrator for designing, setting up, and managing virtual cloud network, subnets, and other network resources in OCI.
• Cloud Manager Administrator to deploy and manage the EBS Cloud Manager VM and its configuration.
• Application Administrator for managing the EBS application and database once it is up and running, including users, customizations, and updates.

Step 2: Prepare

Once the planning phase is complete, the preparation phase involves setting up your OCI environment and creating a backup of your on-premises system.

• The tenant administrator will create the OCI tenancy first, and the needed user accounts, groups, and policies. This includes creating compartments for different environments such as test, development, and production. The network administrator will configure network infrastructure such as VCNs, subnets, and security rules to host the EBS environment.
• Cloud manager administrator will deploy the EBS Cloud Manager VM from Oracle Cloud Marketplace into your configured OCI tenant. This process is simple and takes only a few clicks. Cloud Manager will then be used to orchestrate the migration and lifecycle management process of EBS.
• Cloud manager administrator will create a complete backup of your existing on-premises EBS environment using the EBS Cloud Backup module. A backup of the application and database tier will then be uploaded to OCI Object Storage to be used as a source for creating a cloud environment.

Step 3: Execute

This is the core migration phase where a new cloud environment will be created from the backup on the Object Storage.

• Cloud manager administrator will provision a new EBS environment from the backup using the Cloud Manager interface. You can select a target architecture, such as single-node or multi-node, along with the database service.
• Cloud Manager will automate the entire process using the advanced provisioning feature to define the architecture, such as how many application tiers and the type of database service you would like to use, such as compute VM, database service, or Exadata. Cloud Manager will restore the backup from Object Storage, perform the necessary configuration to bring up the environment, and start the application services.

Step 4: Validate

The last step is to thoroughly assess the new cloud environment to ensure that it is performing as expected and ready to be used as a production environment.

• The application administrator will log in to the new EBS cloud environment to verify that all the services are accessible and running correctly, and users can log in. Cloud Manager will also show the provisioning status.
• Validate performance testing by comparing the responsiveness of the OCI environment with on-premises environments, such as transaction processing time or report generation, and confirm that the system can manage the production workload.
• Conduct regression testing to make sure that business processes, integrations, and customizations are working on OCI compared to the on-premises system.
• Upon successful completion of testing and satisfaction, you can plan for the final cutover and switch to the OCI environment by importing the final data and officially going live. When the new system is stable, you can decommission the old on-premises system.

EBS Migration Types

Overview of Migration Categories

Organizations planning to migrate their Oracle E-Business Suite to the cloud are looking for enhanced performance, scalability, and use of new technologies. The primary purpose of migrating to the cloud is to achieve cost savings compared to on-premises environments, such as:

• Reduced data center space
• Power, and hardware costs

Being on the cloud gives you the same environment but without these extra expenses. Migration categories can be divided into two main categories:

• Application migration
• Data migration

An organization can choose either cloud migration or data migration, or a combination of both.

Cloud Migration

This type involves migrating the entire EBS application, including the database, configurations, and integrations, from one hosting environment, such as an on-premises data center or another cloud provider, to either Oracle’s own Cloud Infrastructure or another cloud platform.

Data Migration to Cloud

This type of migration focuses on migrating data from legacy systems, on-premises environments, or from one cloud platform to another. This can be a new EBS implementation requirement with an existing database or when combining environments. An example scenario would be for some organizations to migrate their EBS application to Oracle Cloud and either migrate or host the Oracle database on AWS Cloud.

Oracle EBS Migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Migrating Oracle EBS to OCI is the process of transitioning application data, workflows, configurations, and integrations to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This process requires planning and allows organizations to continue using their familiar EBS on-premises environment in the cloud while gaining the benefits of the cloud.

Benefits of OCI

Following are the key benefits of OCI:

• Improved Scalability: OCI offers dynamically scalable infrastructure that allows organizations to use resources based on demand and adjust them when they are not using those resources.
• Cost Savings: OCI offers a pay-as-you-go operational expenditure model, allowing organizations to shift from a capital expenditure on hardware model, lowering their total cost of ownership.
• Continuous innovation: OCI offers the latest features such as AI and machine learning, automatic updates, analytics, and integrated cloud services that help organizations to stay competitive without manual interventions.
• Simplified Maintenance: Migrating to OCI reduces the administrative burden on IT teams from performing routine maintenance such as hardware maintenance, power, and cooling, enabling them to focus on more important tasks.
• Enhanced Security: OCI offers an advanced security-first architecture for network and data access protection, including identity management, encryption, and monitoring to help organizations meet security compliance requirements.
• Streamlined Migration: OCI provides the Oracle Cloud Manager tool and Oracle Cloud Lift services to streamline, simplify, and automate the migration process so that organizations can keep their current applications, customizations, integrations, and workflows in the cloud.

Successful Migration Testing Strategy

Successful migration depends on thorough testing and is divided into the following three categories:

• Pre-migration testing: This process involves thoroughly conducting testing on the existing on-premises environment to find potential challenges with applications, customizations, integrations, and workflows, to establish performance metrics before moving to the cloud.
• Post-migration testing: The migrated environment is tested on OCI against the same performance baseline defined during pre-migration testing, and verifies that the environment performs as expected, such as performance, functional, and security testing.
• Continuous testing: Continuous and automated performance and regression testing after migration helps in pointing out other unforeseen issues.

Testing Best Practices

• Collaborative approach: The testing team should work with development, operations, the IT team, and some end users for end-to-end validation.
• Iterative methodology: Testing should be conducted in manageable, smaller cycles, phases, or sprints for correct results.
• Environment management: Test and development environments should mirror the production environment or be close to production so that the correct test results can be obtained that help in identifying environmental issues.
• Documentation: All the testing procedures, results, and resolutions should be thoroughly documented, as this provides insight into any issues encountered during the migration process.
• Use of tools: Using tools like Oracle Application Testing Suite (OATS) can be helpful for performance, functional, and load testing of applications, while Oracle Real Application Testing (RAT) is specifically designed for database testing scenarios and impacts.

Data Migration for Oracle EBS

The data migration process is transferring data from legacy systems, spreadsheets, or other data sources into Oracle EBS. It is a complex process that requires planning and execution to ensure the accuracy and integrity of data.

Following are the strategies and best practices for data migration for Oracle EBS.

Planning and Data Preparation

• Data Assessment: Analyze all data sources, their types, and formats to analyze data quality and spot duplicates and inconsistencies.
• Define Scope: Define the scope of data, such as which data or tables are needed for migration and need transformation according to the EBS structure.
• Develop Strategy: Create a detailed migration approach, such as parallel or phased migration, for assigning resources and setting up a timeline.
• Plan backup/Recovery: Make sure that backup and recovery plans are in place before starting the migration process.

Data Mapping and Transformation

• Understand EBS Data Model: It is essential to make yourself familiar with the target Oracle database tables and their relationship, needed fields, constraints, and dependencies.
• Document Mapping: Create mapping documentation for each corresponding source system field to target EBS system fields for transformation and validation.
• Cleanse Data: Set up data cleaning processes for removing any duplicates and correcting inaccuracies to meet EBS standards.

Data Validation and Pre-Load Checks

• Validate Integrity: Run checks using scripts or profiling tools to make sure that data relationships are not broken and all mandatory fields are populated.
• Completeness and Accuracy: Confirm the completeness and accuracy of data before loading into the target EBS system.
• Plan Error Handling: Define transparent processes for logging, reporting, and resolving errors that occur during validation.

Data Loading Techniques

• Oracle Data Loaders (FNDLOAD): Use the standard Oracle data loader, a utility provided by Oracle for migrating configurations and data between EBS instances.
• Oracle APIs: Use official Oracle Rest Data Services (ORDS) to load complex transactional or master data to ensure data integrity and execution of business rules.
• Open Interface Tables: Use Oracle Open interface tables for data loading, then confirm the data and transfer to application tables.

Post-Migration Verification

• Data Reconciliation: Compare data such as key financial totals to ensure completeness and accuracy.
• Data Audits: Conduct a detailed audit on subsets of the migrated data to confirm accuracy and business requirements.
• User Acceptance Testing: Involve business users to test the new EBS system with migrated data to confirm if it is working as expected.
• Data Archiving: Plan for secure archiving of data from the legacy or on-premises systems after successful migration.

Data Migration Performance

• Data Partitioning: Divide extensive data sets into smaller and more manageable chunks for parallel processing.
• Parallel Processing: Use multiple processing threads to load data sets simultaneously.
• Batch Size Adjustment: Adjust the size of data batches for optimized loading performance.