Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Getting Started with Oracle Cloud Migrations

Review the prerequisites for using Oracle Cloud Migrations service and how to get started with the Oracle Cloud Migrations service.

Prerequisites for Using Oracle Cloud Migrations

Before you begin using the Oracle Cloud Migrations (OCM) service, ensure that you meet the following prerequisites:

  • Access to an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) tenancy. See Accessing Oracle Cloud Migrations.
  • Create or designate compartments to use.

    Create a compartment or use an existing one. For recommendations on setting compartments in Oracle Cloud Migrations, see Recommendations for Working with Compartments. The compartment ID and name are required so that Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies and dynamic groups can be associated with it. Oracle Cloud Migrations integrates with IAM for authentication and authorization of all interfaces (OCI Console, SDK, CLI, and REST APIs). Access permissions are provided to you within a particular compartment. For more information about creating compartments, see Managing Compartments.

  • An administrator in your organization sets up groups, compartments, and policies that compartments policies  control who (users) can access which services, and which resources, and the type of access they have. See Setting Up Groups, Users, and User Access for Oracle Cloud Migrations.
  • An administrator in your organization sets up the required Oracle Cloud Migrations service policies. See Oracle Cloud Migrations Service Policies.
  • Provide agent dependency, a third-party VMware library called Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). An agent dependency is a third-party package that the remote agent appliance needs for its operation. Due to the licensing restrictions of the third-party package, VDDK isn’t included in the remote agent appliance software package. Therefore, you can add the agent dependencies to the source environment as third-party library dependency to the remote agent appliance. For information on how to manage agent dependencies, see Managing Agent Dependencies.
  • Create a private bucket to store the source assets snapshots. See About Replication Bucket
  • Create a vault to store credentials used by the OCM service. See Managing Vaults.
    Create a vault secret policy in the root compartment to allow the dynamic group to read secrets. See Overview of Vault and Managing Secrets. For example:
    Allow dynamic-group <dynamic_group_name> to read secret-family in compartment <compartment_name>
  • Create a tag namespace CloudMigrations in your tenancy and add the following tag keys:
    • SourceEnvironmentType
    • SourceEnvironmentId
    • SourceAssetId
    • MigrationProject
    • ServiceUse
    These tags are used by Oracle Cloud Migration service to track migrated resources. You can also filter by these tags to track the cost and usage of migrated resources in the OCI Cost Analysis tool. See Tagging.

Deploying Prerequisites for Oracle Cloud Migrations

The recommended way to deploy Oracle Cloud Migrations prerequisites is by using the Resource Manager Stack provided on the Oracle Cloud Migrations Overview page of the Oracle Cloud Console. For information on how to deploy prerequisites using the Oracle Cloud Console, see Deploy Required Migration Prerequisites.

Recommendations for Working with Compartments

To help you get started with Oracle Cloud Migrations, you can refer to the following approach for setting up compartments.

Approach to Set Up Compartments in Oracle Cloud Migrations

The Oracle Cloud Console displays your resources by compartment within the current region. To know about how to create compartments and manage cloud resources in the compartment, see Managing Compartments.

Consider that migration is a temporary activity in your tenancy. We recommend using a multiple-compartment approach for organizing and managing communication between migration service components. You can create the following three compartments:

  • Migration: A designated compartment for all the temporary resources that are used when performing migrations. These are source environment, remote connection agents, asset sources, inventory assets, migration projects, migration plans, hydration agents, replicated snapshots, temporary volumes (boot and data volumes.)
  • Migration_secrets: A compartment to store secrets that are used by the asset source. For security reasons, we recommend not to share this compartment with any other migration projects, and not to store any other secrets in this compartment. As a best practice, create such compartment for one migration project only, store only essential secrets, and remove the compartment immediately after the migration project completes.
  • Destination: A compartment in which the target assets are created. The migrated instances created by Oracle Cloud Migrations reside in this compartment. Use this compartment to be part of post-migration production.
    Note

    The destination compartment can be an existing compartment that already has non-migration-related production resources.

Setting Up Groups, Users, and User Access for Oracle Cloud Migrations

Learn how you can create groups, users in the groups and grant permissions to users.

Create at least one user in your tenancy who wants to work with Oracle Cloud Migrations. This user must be created in the Identity service.

Note the following steps:

  1. Create a group or use an existing group in your tenancy.
  2. Create users and add them to the group, or add existing users to the group.
  3. Create Common Policies to authorize Oracle Cloud Migrations users.
  4. Create Oracle Cloud Migrations policies to control user access to Oracle Cloud Migrations. See Oracle Cloud Migrations IAM Policies.
    Note

    Ensure that you assign the required permissions for Compute and Networking resources to run the migrated resources into the target components.

Required IAM Policies

Each service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) integrates with Identity and Access Management (IAM) for authentication and authorization, for all interfaces (the Console, SDK and CLI, and REST API).

The Oracle Cloud Migrations service consists of multiple modules, and these modules must be able to interact with each other. For example, the discovery module stores discovered assets in the inventory module, and the migration module creates and manages volumes and temporary hydration instances during migration, and so on. The OCI security model requires you, as the tenancy owner, to grant these modules explicit permissions for the required operations. Therefore, before you begin using any of the modules, ensure that you grant proper permissions to these modules. For more information about Oracle Cloud Migrations permissions to be granted, see Oracle Cloud Migrations IAM Policies.

Oracle Cloud Migrations supports Policy Builder. To create policies using policy builder, see Writing Policy Statements with the Policy Builder.

Authentication and Authorization

Learn how you can access the Oracle Cloud Migrations service when you are a regular user or an administrator.

An administrator in your organization must set up groups, compartments, and policies compartments , and policies  that control which users can access which services, which resources, and the type of access they have. For example, the policies control who can create users, create and manage the cloud network, and run instances.

If you're a regular user (not an administrator) and you need to access the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources of your organization, contact your OCI administrator to apply the necessary permissions to your user account. The administrator can also confirm which compartment or compartments you can access.

Using the Oracle Cloud Migrations Service

To use the Oracle Cloud Migrations for migrating your virtual machines (VMs) from on-premises to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), here's what you can do:

Manage Assets

Before starting the migration process, follow these steps to identify and collate information about the VMs to be migrated:

  1. Connect an external environment to OCI

    A source environment represents an on-premises environment (outside of OCI), such as an on-premises datacenter with VMware vCenter deployment.

    To connect an external environment to OCI, you must set up a source environment. See Creating an Environment.

  2. Install a remote agent appliance

    The Oracle Cloud Migrations discovery and replication capabilities use the remote agent appliance to automatically collect the metadata of virtual machines in an external environment and replicate the virtual machine data disks from an external environment to OCI. See Installing a Remote Agent Appliance for VMware vCenter.

  3. Register a remote agent appliance

    Register and verify the remote agent appliance in the VMware external environment. For more information, see the following topics:

  4. Create agent dependencies for an environment

    To enable remote agent appliance operations, agent dependencies must be added to a source environment as third-party library dependencies to the remote agent appliance.

    You must add the agent dependencies using the Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). See Configuring VDDK as an Agent Dependency for VMware vSphere.

  5. Create an asset source

    Asset discovery allows identification and metadata collection for the VMs from the external environment and representation of these and relevant metadata in the inventory assets to facilitate the migration process. See Creating an Asset Source.

  6. Create a discovery work request

    After creating an asset source, run external asset discovery. See Creating a Discovery Work Request.

  7. View inventory assets

    An inventory contains a collection of assets and associated metadata. This data is collected during external asset discovery. You can browse the discovered assets and start planning the migration process. See Getting an Inventory Asset's Details.

Analyze and Migrate Assets

After you discover the migration assets and collect the required data, follow these steps to migrate the virtual machines to OCI:

  1. Create migration project

    To replicate all the associated migration assets, create a migration project. See Creating a Simple Migration Project.

  2. Add migration assets

    Add migration assets located in the inventory to the migration project. See Creating Migration Assets in a Migration Project.

  3. Create migration plan

    Within a migration project, you can create migration plans. A migration plan is a detailed mapping of external assets to target assets in OCI and the configuration to launch them, including compartment assignments, shape and size selection, and target network dependencies. See Creating a Migration Plan.

    The migration plans include asset compatibility and the details of the estimated cost per month. The compatibility and cost estimates for migration are automatically generated while creating the migration plan. You can use the recommended specifications or manually configure them, based on your requirements. See Configuring a Target Asset.

  4. Replicate migration assets

    Replicate the configured migration assets. See Replicating a Migration Asset Manually.

Verify Migration

To verify a successful migration, follow these steps:
  1. Generate and deploy a Resource Manager Stack (RMS) for a migration plan

    To verify the replication, the target assets are launched to OCI instances using Oracle Resource Manager (ORM). See Generating a Resource Manager Stack for a Migration Plan.

    Deploy the RMS stacks and check if the instances are created in OCI. See Deploying a Resource Manager Stack for a Migration Plan.

  2. Complete a migration project

    After you successfully migrate the assets to the target environment and validate the migrated assets, the project must be marked as complete. This action blocks the migration modules from attempting to discover further changes to the source environment or suggesting new recommendations. See Completing a Migration Project.