UNIX/Linux Migration Consultant

Role: UNIX/Linux Migration Consultant 

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Duration: Long Term

Required Skills

• 4 years’ experience in planning and executing UNIX server migrations, including Develop a cutover strategy for file systems, application binaries, cron jobs, and middleware stack. Account for environment variables, shell behavior, and dependent services.
• 4 years’ experience in designing and implementing high availability and disaster recovery for server infrastructure
• 4 years’ experience managing migration planning activities including stakeholder coordination, scope definition, reporting requirements, risk mitigation, and change management within enterprise data center projects.
• 4 years’ experience providing post-migration stabilization and Hyper Care support, including performance troubleshooting, interdependency validation, and resolution of server issues.
• 4 years’ experience configuring and troubleshooting AIX, Linux, and Solaris servers                                                                
   

Tasks & Duties:

• Focus Area: Migration of Solaris and AIX workloads to AIX 7.3, RHEL 9, and container platforms (OpenShift 4.12+)
• Migrate all Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 Global and Non-Global Zones (both branded and native) to target platforms including AIX 7.2/7.3 LPARs, RHEL 7/8/9 systems, and containerized environments. The effort includes full hosting of the operating system environment, encompassing all filesystems, applications, startup configurations, service definitions, cron jobs, user accounts, and system-level integrations. Special consideration must be given to the technical complexity of transitioning from SPARC hardware and Solaris services to IBM Power10-based AIX platforms or container-native platforms. The consultant must handle translation of OS-level constructs and ensure seamless continuation of legacy workloads, while also accommodating modern security and performance standards.
• Note: The most critical application, POS, is being migrated from Solaris 11 to AIX 7.3. This POS system currently operates in a clustered environment using Veritas SFRAC and will be platformed to an Oracle ASM-based 8-node AIX 7.3 cluster. This transition involves significant engineering effort due to the complexity of Veritas CFS and GAB/LLT clustering mechanisms, Oracle database storage layout transformation, kernel tuning, and the requirement to establish Oracle RAC connectivity, ASM disk groups, CRS startup dependencies, and HA agent configurations in the new AIX environment. Data integrity, uptime sensitivity, and strict RPO/RTO requirements make this a highly demanding component of migration.
• High-Level Steps:
• Identify and catalog legacy Solaris systems including Logical Domains (LDOMs), Zones, and Standalone systems. Include underlying hardware platforms, networking, and application footprint.
• Evaluate all running applications, services, and system configurations. Determine which components can be directly ported, which require transformation, and which must be architected for containers or AIX. Develop architecting based on findings.
• Prepare target environments (AIX LPARs, RHEL VMs, or OpenShift containers), ensuring resource provisioning, compatible disk layouts, IP planning, and authentication integrations are established.
• Develop a cutover strategy for file systems, application binaries, cron jobs, and middleware stack. Account for environment variables, shell behavior, and dependent services.
• Conduct post-migration validation, service checkouts, log audits, user verification, and job testing to ensure parity with legacy system behavior.
• Technical Migration Tasks:
• Migrate Solaris Logical Domains (LDOMs) hosted on SPARC platforms to AIX 7.3 LPARs and RHEL 8/9 systems. Preserve disk partitions, IP schema, system boot behavior, hostname, and service daemons. This process requires detailed knowledge of platform interdependencies and hardware abstraction.
• Host Solaris-based applications (such as Oracle tools, Apache web services, and in-house binaries) onto AIX or RHEL 9. Convert SMF and init-based service definitions, manage libraries, and ensure equivalent OS services are present or adapted.
• Transition AIX Logical Partitions (LPARs) to AIX 7.3 LPARs. Build the execution environment including chroot-style partitions, filesystems, local users, and hostname settings. Validate through comparative runtime analysis.
• Migrate standalone AIX 6.1/7.1 systems to AIX 7.3 on IBM Power10. Carefully preserve legacy device mappings, exports and automount behaviors, custom binaries, job scheduling frameworks, and performance tuning profiles.
• Transform Solaris-based services into OCI-compliant containers. Extract functional units such as web services or monitoring agents, containerize them using standardized tools, and stage for OpenShift deployment. Adapt volume mounts and init routines into container standards.
• Host existing containerized workloads into OpenShift 4.12+ environments. Create containers build pipelines, CI/CD hooks, and define deployments using YAML manifests. Confirm secrets handling and application startup sequencing.
• Move essential system services—cron jobs, SFTP/FTP daemons, logging agents—from Solaris and AIX platforms to RHEL 9 or OpenShift containers. Create working environments and rebind storage locations, ensuring service behavior mimics original systems.
• Migrate middleware applications from legacy Solaris and AIX systems to modern platforms. Handle application stack validation including configuration files, environment variables, system libraries, and startup control mechanisms.
• Convert Solaris ZFS/UFS file systems into JFS2 (for AIX) or XFS/LVM (for RHEL). Ensure preservation of directory structure, mount points, user permissions, quota policies, and fstab/automount entries.
• Transfer to user environments and authentication mechanisms. Export and create user definitions, SSH key associations, sudo policies, group memberships, and PAM modules on new platforms.
• Port and validate all custom shell and automation scripts. Ensure ksh, bash, and Perl scripts execute correctly by verifying dependencies, runtime permissions, output paths, and logging routines.
• Convert Solaris SMF and init.d services to RHEL systemd unit files or equivalent AIX startup services. Manage dependencies, restart behavior, service logs, and failure handling protocols.
• Deploy backup software clients, transitioning systems from legacy NetBackup to Commvault where applicable. Manage installation, registration, backup job definition, and validation of connectivity with centralized backup servers.
• Migrate system logging configurations to modern standards (journald, rsyslog) from legacy syslog-based systems. Confirm retention policies, remote forwarding, and logging of all migrated services are maintained post-cutover.
• Validate that all applications and services operate identically. This includes monitoring active processes, confirming log entries, service reachability, file access, and inter-process communication.
• Reconnect shared file systems and mounts such as NFS and CIFS. Validate /etc/fstab, mount permissions, exported directories, client visibility, and consistency of mount behavior during boot and runtime.
• Migrate POS application stack from Solaris 11 and Veritas SFRAC to AIX 7.3 using Oracle ASM in an 8-node clustered setup. Migration includes building the HA environment with Oracle Grid Infrastructure, configuring Oracle ASM with appropriate disk groups and redundancy, integrating the Oracle RAC database cluster, and validating listener, TNS, and SCAN configurations. Special care must be taken to replicate the service dependencies managed by Veritas Cluster Server and ensure full compatibility of Oracle services and interconnects within the new AIX environment. File-level migration of Oracle binaries, tnsnames.ora, sqlnet.ora, and spfile configurations must also be conducted with precision. Redundant power paths, multipath configurations, and IBM AIX MPIO tuning should also be validated as part of this step.
• Conduct comprehensive validation and operational certification of the POS environment following migration. This includes end-to-end database validation, testing Oracle Grid startup/shutdown sequencing, RAC node join/eviction scenarios, transaction consistency checks, user acceptance testing (UAT) with POS operations teams, performance benchmarking, and simulation of failover scenarios. The migration team must also produce runbooks detailing new operational procedures, support contacts, log review guidelines, and backup/recovery approaches tailored to the new AIX-based ASM cluster configuration.
• Perform equivalent migration of the Oracle Data Guard standby environment supporting POS. This includes provisioning a secondary AIX 7.3 cluster configured for Data Guard role, duplicating Oracle ASM storage layout, and establishing log shipping, archivelog transport parameters, and Data Guard broker configurations. Oracle listener and SCAN setup must also mirror primary to allow seamless role transitions during switchover/failover testing.
• Execute full validation of the standby POS Data Guard configuration including recovery test cycles, Redo Apply verification, failover simulation, switchover readiness checks, and full DR testing with operations and DBA teams. Performance benchmarking between primary and standby clusters should be included to ensure real-time synchronization and RTO/RPO objectives are met. Runbooks for DR invocation and post-DR reinstatement must also be developed and verified.