Your Guide to moving Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 to AWS

The Cloud Advantage for Oracle E-Business Suite

Traditional on-premise deployments of Oracle E-Business Suite often limit scalability and increase upfront costs. By migrating to AWS, organisations can unlock the suite’s full potential while reducing expenses. AWS offers a highly flexible and scalable infrastructure that can accommodate growing business needs without the constraints of physical hardware.

At Blue Crystal Solutions, we specialise in helping businesses transition their E-Business Suite environments to AWS. Our expertise ensures a seamless migration process and enables organisations to realise significant benefits, including:

• Reduced Capital Expenditures: Eliminate the need for costly on-premise hardware and infrastructure.
• Enhanced Scalability: Easily adjust resources to meet fluctuating demands.
• Increased Reliability: Benefit from AWS’s robust and secure cloud infrastructure.
• Improved Performance: Optimise your E-Business Suite environment for optimal performance.

In this article, we will provide a step-by-step guide for migrating Oracle E-Business Suite to AWS, including essential prerequisites, architectural considerations, and best practices.

Oracle e-Business Suite Case and Benefits

Oracle E-Business Suite is an Enterprise-wide suite of integrated applications such as CRM, Supply Chain/Logistics, HR/Payroll, Procurement, Finance, Payables/Receivables, etc., implemented within organisations to automate business operations. It also consumes an enormous part of the overall IT budget. However, this does not mean that the organization needs to purchase or lock itself into expensive and/or legacy on-premise hardware and subsequently put hard limits on the scalability of the suite and, therefore, the return on investment (ROI).

A supported cloud vendor such as AWS removes all limitations on flexibility and scalability, drastically cuts down upfront capital expenses, and provides resilient infrastructure that scales globally.

At Blue Crystal Solutions, we have successfully helped customers move from traditional/legacy datacentres onto AWS and helped many with the installation of new environments that they could test-drive, where they have immediately started noticing the benefits. 

SA Health Case Study: How Blue Crystal Solutions Supports the Oracle E-Business Application and provides Database Management for South Australia’s largest health department

Prerequisites and Implementation

An AWS IAM account is needed with appropriate privileges (or the root account can be used to begin with) to create a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) spanning all the Availability Zones (AZ), after which we would need to create a private subnet in each AZ. This setup will provide private connectivity to the corporate network. For internet-facing applications, each AZ needs to have a public subnet and a private subnet, with the public subnet hosting the mid-tier servers with elastic IPs and the private subnet hosting the database servers.

The Network Access Control List (NACL) of the public subnet and security groups of instances launched in it should allow for inbound (and response) http and https traffic. In the E-Business suite, the HTTP port would be 8000 for the default port pool. The https port is configurable independent of the port pool. The NACL and security groups for the private subnet and instances inside it should allow for database traffic(stateful) from public to private subnet and HTTP/https traffic(stateful) from private to public subnet.

The VPC needs a Network Address Translation (NAT) gateway for the instances to fetch OS updates and allow download of Oracle software. Either a Virtual Private Gateway, along with Internet Protocol Security (IPSEC) connectivity to an on-premise/customer data centre, or an AWS Direct Connect setup is required. This will be discussed in future papers.

Ensure the instances being launched have sufficient capacity. An r5.4xlarge (16vCPU/128GB) for each of the database and middle-tier nodes is enough to perform smooth installation and testing. Each instance should have a 300+GB EBS volume (can be Elastic Block Storage (EBS) backed root). Ensure this volume is much less than 1T as cloud Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7+ environments provide a filesystem for root volumes, and this is a 64-bit only filesystem with 64-bit inodes. So, 32-bit applications won’t be able to access files/folders with inodes that utilise higher than 32 bits. A 300GB root EBS volume is safe.