Report for September 2019

Report Date

September 2019

Summary - Scope and Objective Change

Original plan and of this project was to move to a virtualised environments and to use MariaDB in preference to MySQL. As a by product of the project, the University would stop using MySQL and avoid a £27,000 licence maintenance renewal. The project scope did not include decommissioning of the MySQL environments.  However, as of 30th July 2019 clarification has been received from Oracle, the licence owner of MySQL, that to avoid the licence renewal liability, all MySQL environments must be decommissioned. This must be accomplished by Mid October 2019. The impact of this objective change increases pressure on the project to deliver the full decommissioning .  

A change request has been raised to increase the overall project priority from Higher to Highest. A further change request needs to be documented to add a number of additional deliverables including;

• The migration of ALL MySQL applications from the current MySQL servers to a Virtual Server running Maria DB
• The migration of ALL other applications running on these servers to ‘somewhere else’
• Decommission of DEV /TEST / LIVE  Linux 6 Platforms used by MySQL / file shares.  
• Closing down the servers by 25/10 (so that Oracle will not charge for licensing

Other contingency mitigation options have been considered but no recommendation  has been put forward.  These include;

• Mariabackup
• SQL Dumps
• File System Snapshots
• LVM

The risk of not achieving the 25th October has been reduced by the team's decision to migrate to Maria DB on the current physical server, with the move to VM as a separate second stage of the project.

Achievements in Last Period

• complete PICCL amending the scope and deliverables of the project - Done
• An analysis of all applications that must be migrated from the environment - Done
• Confirmation of the date of notice of termination of MySQL licence contract - Done
• complete performance testing - not achieved
• complete R&D into puppet  and bamboo for Maria DB - Done
• plan the new approach to stay on physical until migration to Maria DB is over - Done
• migrate in Dev and Test Edweb - achieved
• Commence UAT testing for Edweb - achieved

Issues/Risk

• Absence of technical resources impacting the delivery of the project - mitigated by setting project as Highest priority
• new risk raised - redefining the objective for the project with a target milestone for delivery of just two months risks requiring more budget

Next Steps

• deploy EdWeb to Live
• migrate training and staging environments for Edweb
• comms to CAM, Blogs and MGen applications' users
• upgrade all DEV environments to Maria DB for CAM, Blogs and MGen applications
• upgrade all TEST environments to Maria DB for CAM, Blogs and MGen applications
• upgrade all LIVE environments to Maria DB for CAM, Blogs and MGen applications

Milestones