EPM Lab – OCI Migration

Posted by Jun on December 26, 2022

Starting from late 2022, Oracle kicks off migrating all the existing cloud environments in the legacy Classic commercial data centers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

If you were new to the Oracle EPM and the instance just got provisioned and created, you might have started using OCI directly. But if you have been using EPM for years, most likely you are using the classic commercial data centers. Migration is surely suggested and over time there will be OCI only.

First a few common questions are, what is OCI; am I using OCI; why move to OCI; what are the migration plans? We will look into these one by one.

What and Why

As we mentioned, OCI stands for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Per Oracle, OCI is “The next-generation cloud designed to run any application, faster and more securely, for less.” Yes, it is the foundation of Oracle’s second-generation cloud. OCI provides a purpose-built, best-in-class platform for running enterprise applications.

Oracle’s data centers around the globe are standardizing on the OCI architecture which delivers greater performance and reliability. Most importantly, why would we migrate to OCI? Many features of EPM Cloud are available only in OCI. Do remember, soon, the legacy cloud environments will be deprecated.

Am I using OCI?

The best way to figure out whether you are under OCI is surely checking with the Oracle sales rep or Oracle support. Well, on the other side, the look and feel between the legacy cloud and OCI are different as well.

1.The legacy platform

For example, the legacy system has the instances provisioned for you already. When you open up the My Services dashboard page, it looks like the following.

When opening up the Service page, it displays the info as this.

2.The OCI

The OCI platform truly provides a lot more. It allows you to create instances on your own. When you open up the dashboard page, it looks like the following.

The Services page looks different too.

The major difference is when opening up the Identity Console. It is self served. You will be able to customize the platform based on your needs. We will look into the details in the later section.

Features

Since we discussed the OCI only features, let’s take a look of few new features.

Cloud Identity Console: A console that lets you perform user and security management tasks such as creating users, removing users, assigning and unassigning roles, and setting up SSO.
New audit reports: Role assignment audit report and invalid audit report are available through EPM Automate and REST APIs.
OAuth 2 support for REST API, EPM Automate, and EPM Integration Agent: Use OAuth 2 access tokens to avoid the use of passwords.
Support of multiple SAML 2.0 compliant identity providers for a domain.
Ability to rename the instance
Private access to EPM Cloud: if you have an OCI IaaS subscription in the same data center as your EPM cloud, you can use the service gateway service to avoid having traffic go over the internet.
Change password policy
Block connections from specific countries.
Database encryption using AES-256
OCI block volume encryption
Customization of Sign-in Page
Customization of Notifications
Encryption Keys stored in Hardware Security Module (HSM)

Location

The region and location are different from the legacy classic data centers.

For the North America US001 region, there are 4 locations

US East – Ashburn: us-ashburn-1
US West – Phoenix: us-phoenix-1
Canada Southeast – Montreal: ca-montreal-1
Canada Southeast – Toronto: ca-toronto-1

For new and existing systems

For the Net-new Commercial systems (i.e., a customer with no existing EPM Cloud subscriptions), they are provisioned in OCI data centers.
For the existing Commercial systems (i.e., a customer that already has existing EPM Cloud subscriptions), the data centers of the new environments depend on the data center status of the current environments.

Migration Plan

Now, if you are using the legacy cloud classic data centers, migrating them to OCI ASAP is highly recommended.. Speaking of the migration plan, there are 2 options.

Customer managed migration
Oracle managed migration

A.Customer managed migration

If you decide to choose the customer managed option, here are the key steps.

1.creates an SR

Flexibility to domain names of their choice
Flexibility to provide OCI data centers of their choice in the same geographical region as the current Classic environments.

2.Oracle provides new OCI environments equaling the current number of Classic environments.

3.You will have 6 months to complete the migration to OCI.

4.Oracle will terminate the Classic environments after 6 months.

Tips

Once the migration is complete, the service admin would need to process the following tasks

Announce the URLs of the OCI environments to EPM Cloud users
Modify EPM Automate and REST API scripts to change URLs
If vanity URLs are used to connect to environments, update them to point to the new URLs
If Navigation Flows are used, update Connections to change URLs
If EPM Agent is used, update its configuration to change URLs
If you have any other integrations, such as, with FDMEE or NetSuite, update them to change URLs
Update Smart View shared and private connections to change URLs

B.Oracle managed migration

If you decide to choose the Oracle managed option, here are the key steps.

1.Oracle notifies all Service Administrators when the OCI migration will occur for their Classic environments – at least 1 month before the scheduled migration date.

2.On the scheduled migration date, Oracle provides new OCI environments equaling the current number of Classic environments.

OCI environments will have new service URLs.
Classic environments continue to work at the same time.

3.You have 2 months to finish testing.

4.At the end of 2 months, Oracle migrates application and other artifacts from Classic environments to OCI environments, overriding any test applications you already have on the OCI environments, changes the DNS configuration so that the existing Classic service URLs are routed to OCI environments, and terminates Classic environments.