Specifications

Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Oracle Solaris Porting Guide
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packages on top of the default installation. Hence, you will have to carefully set the PATH environment
in your development and deployment environments in order to invoke the correct utilities from the
system.
From the previously mentioned migration phases, you estimaet the time required for completing most
of the tasks because the amount of effort required does not very much with the target platform. For
example, functional testing, soak testing, and stress testing, are usually fairly consistent across
platforms. The area that can potentially pose the maximum risk is the complexities involved in porting
the legacy native code. This risk can be minimized by spending sufficient time and effort during the
planning phase.
Though both the operating systems are similar in many aspects, you might observe subtle differences
when it comes to porting legacy native code. Hence, the effort required for the transition to Oracle
Solaris 11 will greatly vary due to the composition of application components as well as the
programming language and tools used by various application subcomponents. To arrive at an estimate
for the porting effort, it is important to classify the various application subcomponents based on their
implementation complexities.
Assessment of the Application Porting Effort
The most important part of migration process is the assessment of existing applications and the
associated environment. This will allow you to create a risk list that can be used to identify any areas of
the project that might require proof of concept to ensure that the project can be completed.
The outcome of the assessment will be a risk list and a work breakdown structure that details the amount
of effort required to migrate the application modules and the associated environment. The work
breakdown structure can then used to create a plan and to schedule various activities. During project
execution, remember to allow sufficient time to follow Oracle recommended best practices as well as
to time to re-architect some of the modules or to change the deployment strategy to get most from
Oracle Solaris 11.
For custom, quickly evolving applications, it is very important to freeze a snapshot of the application
source code and associated infrastructure to serve as a baseline for the migration activity. The
following sections discuss best practices that can greatly help in identifying the overall migration effort
and potential areas of risk.
Limiting the Scope
Understanding the composition of the code used by an application is a critical part of the planning
process. Since many legacy applications are large (millions of lines of code), simply trying to understand
the layout of the source tree and the types of files can become a complex task. Developers seldom
remove old, unused code from the source code directory, and seldom are there different build
instructions for each targeted deployment scenario.
As an application evolves, new functionality gets added, some business functionality becomes
redundant or irrelevant, and some modules are no longer required for a given deployment scenario.