Overview

Looking to migrate your existing SAP Commerce project to SAP Commerce Cloud? This will require a lift and shift of configurations along with integrations, data, and media replication from the existing infrastructure. In most cases, this will include a database change and a new way to save media. This article focuses on the procedure and required steps to perform the database and media migration. If you would like to read an overview of the entire migration procedure, please see our article "Migrate to SAP Commerce Cloud".

Table of Contents

Data and Media Migration Options

The data and media migration from SAP Commerce on-premise to SAP Commerce Cloud is a delicate phase: the data transferred often contain information subject to data protection policies and it might be transferred during a cutover, making speed of transfer a crucial factor. The challenges of migrating your data securely, paired with the needs for speed and consistency, can be daunting. For these reasons, while a data and media migration can be executed fully by the delivery team during a migration project, SAP also offers an option for customers to offload the activity to experienced SAP representatives.

Executed by SAP

SAP offers a dedicated service called "Data and Media Migration Package" to set up and run data and media migration from your existing SAP Commerce system (be it on-premise or on a different Cloud provider) to SAP Commerce Cloud. SAP would be responsible for aspects such as :

• Secure connectivity to Customer's source environments
• Data Migration
• Media Migration
• Verification of data transfer
• Migration of in-scope Environments (on a one-one basis)
• Allocation of SAP CX Services team members to fit in to the customer/partner managed project plan

Self-serviced (executed by delivery team of Customer or Partner)

In this approach, the Customer and/or Partner is responsible for the management and technical aspects of the data and media migration. These aspects can consist of:

• Provisioning of the target environments in SAP Commerce Cloud
• Secure connectivity to Customer's source environments (e.g. using self-service VPN via the Cloud Portal)
• Data Migration
• Media Migration
• Verification of data transfer
• Migration of in-scope Environments (on a one-one basis)

SAP CX Services may still be engaged to support, however, the Customer and/or Implementation Partner leads all aspects of the project.

Tooling

If engaging SAP to execute the data and media migration, you won't have to worry about this. However, for self-serviced migrations, SAP has released an open source code template called Commerce Migration Toolkit (CMT).

CMT will help you migrate the database data, to migrate media you can follow our article Migrate to SAP Commerce Cloud: Migrate Media with AzCopy. 

Some notes:

1. Database migration: 
   1. The toolkit is a Code Template only, so it is NOT supported by SAP Support.
   2. If you require help, SAP CX Services can be contacted. 
   3. The toolkit is meant to provide guidance concerning how to execute the migration. Your CMT improvements will be highly appreciated by SAP! If you wish to contribute and share your improvements, please do so by following the guidance in the GitHub repository.
2. Media migration: 
   1. AZCopy is typically directly installed on the host with direct access to the media files as this allows for quicker transfers
   2. Recommended to perform transfers over secure VPN connection to Cloud environment. This can be setup via self-service in Cloud portal
   3. A required SAS token is needed to further secure access to Blog storage. An SAP support ticket is required to generate the SAS token

If you're experiencing any limitation when using the CMT approach, and you're unable to find a solution that works for you, you may contact SAP CX Services to help perform the migration: SAP has developed a different proprietary solution to migrate both data and media from the source environments. You can contact SAP also in cases where manual VPN configuration is required.

Migration Concepts

The data and media are copied from your existing source to the target instance of SAP Commerce Cloud. The migration occurs in a like-for-like environment to ensure data segregation and security, that is, Development to Development, Stage to Stage, and Production to Production. There might be cases where you'll prefer to migrate data across different environments and those can be accounted for on a case by case basis. One valid example could be to migrate the data of a testing environment on-premise to the Production environment in SAP Commerce Cloud prior to go live to test the system. 

In case the source system's database differs from the target's database in SAP Commerce Cloud, data transformation might be necessary: this should be accounted for while executing your data migration. 

To ensure the data is copied correctly, the source and target databases must be on the same schema, meaning the same code version.

Ideally, the database migration is aligned with the media migration, since there are cross references.   

Once data and media have been successfully migrated from the source to target environment, testing should be performed to validate the data moved is accurate and valid. Please read through Testing a Migration of SAP Commerce for information on how to properly test your migrated SAP Commerce application prior to production go-live.

Migration Phases

Planning

This phase defines which environments will be involved in the data and media migration and the specific timing of the migration of each of these environments. The typical setup involves three environments (Development, Stage, and Production). However, every customer is different, and the need to migrate fewer or additional environments may exist. For example:

• Some development environments might be re-initialized when deployed. Therefore, their data and media could be excluded from a particular migration project.
• An additional environment could exist in the landscape containing important data to migrate (for example, a pre-production system with lots of test data).

Some critical activities to be planned for are below, regardless of who executes the migration:

1. Establish Secure Connectivity: this needs to be set up for the first data migration to occur and requires you to have a valid subscription on SAP Commerce Cloud. Ideally the VPN configuration will not require any involvement from SAP support teams as it can be done using the self-service VPN feature of the Cloud Portal however it may be necessary to have interactions between your networking team and SAP Cloud Operations & Support. Therefore, time should be set aside for it to ensure that all parties are aligned and the connectivity has been established successfully.
2. Data and Media Migration: this needs to be planned for each in-scope environment and requires the code base to be migrated and deployed on the target environment. Since the data migration is a one-time procedure using the resources of the source and target databases intensively, the Production data and media migration needs to occur during the cutover phase.
3. Testing of the migrated Data and Media: validation of the data after each migration.
4. Post-execution: decommissioning the resources used during the connectivity needs to occur if any were configured/used. Typically, this is done after a successful go-live. This step may not be needed if no custom resources were configured. The decommissioning of the current customer on-premise environments will be left to the customer/partner to determine best timing to remove those resources.

Secure Connectivity 

As mentioned above, secure connectivity is a must when transferring data that might contain personal information. A secure VPN can be created by using the self-service VPN setup available on the Cloud Portal.

By creating this dedicated connectivity, you must respect the following principles:

1. Secure the transfer so no unauthorized person can hook, record, or steal your data before, during, or after the migration.
2. Provide a high-throughput VPN to ensure a reduced transfer time duration and a faster go-live.
3. Configuration via the Cloud  Portal or, if needed, support from SAP with customer/partner networking team with the manual VPN setup.

Migration

The actual migration of data and media is an iterative action, environment by environment. The team responsible for execution will:

1. Confirm the pre-requisites for the corresponding environment migration are met.
2. Configure the data integration technical components for the corresponding environment's database and runtime.
3. Run the data migration.
4. Verify copied data (with tables and rows count) to ensure that the copy was successful.
5. Configure the media migration technical components to transfer media files to target environment.
6. Run the media migration.
7. Verify copied media (through checksum) to ensure that the copy was successful.

For the production environment, the migration must be executed during your planned cutover time. The typical cutover time is between two and six hours.

Post-Migration

In SAP led migration projects, SAP CX Services will trigger the decommissioning of all migration-related resources if any were used/configured to support the on-premise migration to cloud. As mentioned above, if Customer/Partner is leading the migration then the timing of decommissioning those resources is left to that team to determine.

Tips & Tricks

Shorten the migration time

In every migration, you should consider the execution of a cleanup of current data & media on the source systems to avoid importing old and unnecessary data and media. Such data will not only make the migration longer, but they might have performance implications on the target system. Ensure you make your migration more efficient by following the guide: Data Maintenance and Cleanup.

If there are particularly large tables with a lot of data, which may extend the time needed to perform a full data migration, an incremental data copy approach can be considered. The Commerce Migration Toolkit documentation explains how to do that.

Ensure Compatibility with the Cloud system

Verify that source environments data & media will not exceed storage limits in the target environments defined by your subscription to SAP Commerce Cloud. You can find the limit of your target systems in the Service Description available on the SAP Trust Center. Also, the SAP Migration Assessment Service can help identify issues like these early on in the migration project

Performance Test with Data

Ensure adequate time and planning is set aside for performance testing in the SAP Commerce Cloud environment with migrated data. This can help to ensure a smooth transition to go-live by addressing performance issues in target environments. If in your tests you intend to use data protected by data protection regulations, you should plan for data anonymization before the migration. 

A dedicated Performance Guide is also delivered within CMT.  

Test your Rollback Plan

Properly planning for unanticipated events through a well-documented rollback plan during the production cut-over window is strongly encouraged. Some examples of what you may want to test: reverting DNS changes, pointing integration systems back to the source environments, resetting Order generated ID seed values etc.

Troubleshooting

Refer to the Troubleshooting Guide included with the Commerce Migration Toolkit.

Conclusion

This article introduced you to the fundamental steps of migrating your data and media into SAP Commerce Cloud in Public Infrastructure. Now you know what you need to consider when planning your migration project. For more information concerning the related service , please consult the SAP Commerce Cloud Data Migration Package information sheet.