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Writer's picturekyle Hailey

Oracle Cross Platform Provisioning: Magic from the Mess


Linux is taking over the workloads from the shrinking market share of

  1. IBM AIX pSeries

  2. Solaris Sparc Servers

  3. HP-UX Itanium

because Linux provides a reliable and less expensive platform. The costs reductions per users according to IDC for using Linux over UNIX can be on the order of 1/5 the price per end user

Legacy RISC Systems Cost $1,425/User versus Linux at $ 256/User – IDC 2012

The LINUX systems will represent the marjority of the market by 2017

By 2017, 65% of applications running on Unix in 2012 migrate to x86 Linux  ERP scale-out architectures on x86 platforms will rise from a 10% in 2005 to 80% in 2017  – Gartner

How will current UNIX systems migrate to Linux?

For Oracle customers, how can they move data from Oracle on UNIX to Oracle on Linux? There is a magic technlogy from Delphix that will provide this conversion.

For an explanation of both Delphix’s method as well as how to manually convert a database without Delphix read the continuation at http://blog.delphix.com/kyle/2014/delphix-unix-linux-oracle-conversion/

By the way, cross platform conversion can take a long time. The amount of time depends on the size of the database, the number of objects in the database and the hardware being used for the database while converting.

At Delphix the largest database we have converted is 100TB.  We don’t recommend currently tackling a database of more than 10TB because of conversion time. Basically we recommend


  1. Database < 10 TB

  2. Database < 10K objects

  3. Non-EBS, non-peoplesoft  (due to large object count)

These issues will also slow down any conversion using RMAN convert. So if you have a large database, say 150TB with > 10K objects, how will you convert it? It will easily take a week. It’s going to be even harder without Delphix, but if you have a database that doesn’t pass one of the above criteria then it will probably take some consulting time. See Oracle support document 1389592.1 on Oracle’s recommendations for cross platform conversion.

If you want to use Delphix, you have to provide us excellent


  1. Network latency (sub-milli)

  2. Bandwidth(Min 10 GbE),

  3. A class storage(typically SSD’s)

  4. beefed up Compute and Memory for Delphix ( 512 GB dedicated, 24 vCPU).

Although given a small databases you can do the conversion on your own and even for free with Delphix Express ( the free version of Delphix).

Here is a little flow diagram on weather Delphix recommends using Delphix for the conversion:


Screen Shot 2016-03-08 at 12.10.23 PM

PS here is  a discussion with someone trying to convert 500TB though the discussion, so far, hasn’t show anything great

http://www.freelists.org/post/oracle-l/Migrate-from-AIX-to-Linux,9

And here is a more in depth discussion on Oracle-L

http://www.freelists.org/post/oracle-l/Migrate-from-AIX-to-Linux,9

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