Recently Oracle released version 20.1.1.1 of E-Business Suite Cloud Manager. What seems to be a very small step in the version number brings a lot of improvements based on Enhancement Requests I\'ve created in the past years.
Backup Improvements
Let's have a very quick look on what has changed as well as the experience I\'ve made with this with our customers that already upgraded to that latest release:
- It is no longer mandatory to perform a full "validation" of the source database before performing the backup. This reduces the time it takes to create a backup by appx. 2 hours for a typical 5 Terrabyte instance.
- Automatically configured RMAN Channel Count: While when running the manual Lift&Shift Backup utility one has always been able to choose how many RMAN channels to be used there is now a good automation both when creating backups manually or through cloud manager and as well when restoring a backup. By default the number of cores is multiplied with 0.75 to get the number of backup channels allocated.
- Support for Advanced RMAN Compression Algorithms: Given you've licensed the Advanced Compression option of the database you can now easily configure that the RMAN backup is compressed not just with the BASIC but also with advanced algorithms.
- More intelligent selection of the Archivelogs to be backed up: Before this release all archive logs available in the source instance have been backed up. In case you keep 2-3 days of archive logs on your instance then all those files are compressed and uploaded to OCI. This costs both time as well as precious object storage space. With the latest version of the cloud manager only those archive logs that got created while the backup was running get uploaded. Another massive improvement in performance when having a lot of archive logs available locally on the source instance.
- Finally (this is not in the official announcement): A very intermittent bug happening when restoring/recovering has been fixed.
When initiating the backup / restore over cloud manager most of the above options can be conveniently configured over the UI:
For the Lift&Shift utility provided through patch 31254259 these options can be configured through a configuration file as described in the documentation over there: https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/obe/cloud/compute-iaas/creating_backup_of_ebs_instance_on_oci/101_backup_oci.html#CreateanAdvancedConfigurationParametersFile(Optional)
Summary
All in all the improvements described above sped up the time it takes to create a backup from On Premise to OCI of a 5 Terrabyte instance from 10 hours to under 5 hours. The entire restore went down from 8 to 6 hours. There is even more to come: The backup is now performed as an Incremental Level 0 providing the possibility to refresh an existing backup. This is on the roadmap for a further Cloud Manager version and some experiments done "manually" suggest that this can be done even right now with some manual scripting. I will keep you up to date on this in another blog post.