The physical servers that are used to host our Oracle databases are reaching End of Life.(the already extended Hardware contracts expire on April 2022). The solution identified is to move all Oracle databases to a Virtual Infrastructure. It has been agreed that Oracle 19c will be the Oracle database version on the VM. The first service we migrate(JIRA) will be the pilot to test migration using Oracle 19c as the version. It is not expected to be hugely different to Oracle 12c but to be safe, JIRA will be treated as our pilot migration and some extra time, checks and testing will be done to ensure we are happy with it. 

A number of Advantages have been highlighted in moving to a Virtual Infrastructure

• Oracle databases can be managed more efficiently as they are hosted on their own virtual server and not in a shared environment with other databases
• Centos 7 Linux operating system is a more up to date OS 
• Patching of virtual server and related Oracle database can be managed individually and doesn't need to be done in one big bang approach, as is the case when all databases reside on one physical server.
• Capability to fail servers across sites.

Although there are numerous advantages to moving to a Virtual Infrastructure, there is one potential disadvantage.

• Potential Impact on Performance on heavy transactional systems.

This Project (INF149) is a continuation of the great work carried on previous Projects INF142 and INF126. A number of Oracle databases were migrated as part of INF142 and positively no issues were identified  in terms of impact on performance. In saying that, INF149 has different services to migrate, some larger services, heavier transactional services  namely MYEd and Apps,  so this will need to be monitored closely regarding performance.