We are migrating a production Oracle system (running on RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.8) to VMWare ESX via the cold boot VMware Converter Enterprise CD. What needs to be tested on the new VMware instance to be positive that it is working exactly like the old system? Thanks.
You'd basically need your dba to verify that everything is OK on he new VM. It's generally not a good idea to move database server using Converter but if you do then the Cold-Clone is the way to go. You should also not re-size your drives when moving a database, doing this triggers a different copy method (file by file copy instead of disk block by block copy) which could corrupt the db. Oracle db's are very sensitive to their host disk.
Check out these posts...
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=73357
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=581348򍻤
Also check out the best practices for Converter I have posted on my website...
http://vmware-land.com/Converter.html
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Thanks, Eric
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We did not use VmConverter but we did do a migration of Oracle from physical to virtual about 5 years ago and I would agree that you need to be very careful and obviously testing is key. I would run through the same checklists for verification and validation that you would do if this was a database upgrade or new installation of Oracle being rolled out to production.
The method we used for the migration 5 years ago ( there were no good migration tools available then) was to setup a new virtual with a clean Red Hat install setup exactly like production ( file systems and patches). Basically making a virtual copy of the base machine ( OS only ). Then we copied in full backups of the Oracle file systems from the physical. In our case they were a /apps filesystem ( Oracle executables ) and a /data filesystem ( entire database )