Why Cross Platform Provisioning (XPP)

As a consultant I am fortunate to get the opportunity to work and speak with many customers across the whole of EMEA, a topic which is often discussed is the use of the Linux or the ‘Cloud’ for Development and Test teams. I will cover how you can migrate data to the Cloud in a future Blog post, but today I want to get you ready for the Cloud.

The migration of databases to Linux on commodity hardware on-premise or in the Cloud continues to grown year-on-year as IT departments look to reduce their infrastructure and operational costs and also provide greater Agility to the Business. However Unix is far from dead and not everyone is looking to migrate their Production systems to Linux quite yet. This a great example of where Delphix XPP can be used to provide Virtual Development and Test databases on Linux whilst retaining Production on Unix.

Validate Source

If you have a Unix dSource or VDB you may have noticed the ‘Transform to Linux’ option on your dashboard, this Service-lead feature provides an automated approach to the traditional labour intensive challenge of performing Endianness conversion, e.g. Unix (Big Endian) to Linux (Little Endian).

During the validation Delphix will spin-up a temporary VDB, therefore before you start you need to ensure that your Unix staging server has had the ‘Use as Staging’ enabled from within the Server Environment.

To get started Open up the dSource or VDB card, and click on the ‘Linux’ tab, from here click on the Green Tick to validate the ‘Linux Transformation’. Delphix will then perform a series of checks against known Oracle restrictions including:

• No encryption – Columns / Tablespaces
• Locally managed tablespaces (not dictionary managed)
• Tablespaces are self-contained
• Restrictions surrounding XML Types, Spatial Indexes and Advanced Queries

 

If the Validation process fails, use the download the ‘Transformation’ text file to assist in identification and correction of the errors reports. Perform required updates and recommended changes to the Transformation script and Upload and repeat Validation step until successful validation.

Now that you have Validated dSource / VDB the previously greyed out ‘Transform to Linux’ will be available allowing the Provision of Linux VDB’s

Click on ‘Transform to Linux’ and follow the Delphix Provisioning wizard providing Database name and Mount Point as normal.

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