Introduction

Overview

Migrating from Aura Professional to Virtual Dedicated Cloud is an exciting step with many benefits, such as: 

• 99.95% uptime SLA
• 24x7 support 
• Single-tenant with VPC isolation, dedicated cloud infrastructure
• Available on GCP and AWS
• Hourly back-ups with 90 days of retention. (Note that dump files associated with hourly backups will only be kept for 14 days before being deleted.)
• Instance size 2 GB - 256 GB
• More Details here: https://neo4j.com/docs/aura/current/

This brief guide describes the steps to follow to ensure a successful Aura Instance migration from Neo4j Aura Professional to Virtual Dedicated Cloud, outlining the steps to follow and explaining who performs those steps.

Migration Process

Before You Begin

Before you begin, it is important to do preparation beforehand:

Make sure your new Virtual Dedicated Cloud Instance is sized correctly to support the migration. The new Aura Instance you create must be at least as large as your Aura Professional Instance to accommodate the data. The Aura RAM-to-storage ratio is 1:2. For example, a 32 GB Aura Instance will provide 64 GB of storage.

List all the email accounts that have access to Aura Professional.

List existing Aura Professional Instances (with ID) by owner.

Identify which Aura Instances need to be migrated from Aura Professional to Virtual Dedicated Cloud.

Known Limitations

Each user account (or email address) is bound to one tier and cannot see the console for the other tier. For this reason, you can’t use the same email address for Aura Professional and Virtual Dedicated Cloud (VDC). To gain access to your new VDC environment you would need to request an upgrade to your user’s tier.

Virtual Dedicated Cloud offers additional features, so Aura Professional Instances cannot be automatically “upgraded” to VDC. Aura Instances run inside a customer-dedicated VPC and support multiple availability zones.

In the console (Activities on Aura Professional):

• Download snapshot/Dump locally (the daily automatic snapshot)

In the Aura Console, select the Aura Instance

Go to the Snapshots tab

Export the Dump file (preserve the .dump extension) and save it locally.

In the console (Activities on Virtual Dedicated Cloud) :

• Create a new Aura Instance in Virtual Dedicated Cloud with the right resource sizing.
• Upload via Console drag and drop (up to 4GB Dump file) or push-to-cloud
  • From the Aura Console: Drag and drop 
  • Using the command line: neo4j-admin push-to-cloud
• Loading the Dump to your new enterprise environment can take some time, depending on the size of the data to load:
  • Upload speed depends on your connection
  • Full validation of the data is performed upon loading the Dump file, and Aura will meticulously review every detail before coming online. 

Migration Steps

Here is an outline of the migration process. In this example, we will use source@user.com and target@user.com as the accounts involved. source@user.com is the creator and owner of the Aura Instance called source-db in the Aura Professional tier, and target@user.com is the owner of target-db in the Virtual Dedicated Cloud tier.

1. Get accounts/emails (with no Aura Instance ownership in Aura Professional) invited to Virtual Dedicated Cloud and validate access to the Aura Console.
   Ask account target@user.com to confirm access to the Aura console and validate that the environment is a VDC one.
   
   
2. Use one of the invited accounts (target@user.com) to create a target Aura Instance in the Virtual Dedicated Cloud environment.
   Carefully select the right region and the right instance size (should be at least as large as the corresponding Aura Instance instance in Aura Professional).
   Take note of the URI or Aura Instance id for target-db (as displayed in the aura console - https://console.neo4j.io - URI = neo4j+s://ZZZZZZZZ.databases.neo4j.io where ZZZZZZZZ is the Aura Instance id)
3. At this point, target@user.com will load the Dump taken from the preparation and load it via push-to-cloud (or drag and drop if smaller than 4GB).
4. When completed, please delete any Aura Instances (including the Free tier) that are owned by this user source@user.com. 
5. Now that there are no Aura Instances linked to this professional tier account, please raise a ticket to Neo4j Aura Support to request the migration of the Aura Professional account  (source@user.com) to the Virtual Dedicated Cloud tier.
   Note that this request must be performed from the invited account (target@user.com).