As part of PeopleSoft Global Day 2019, Nagendra Krishnappa, Product Manager of PeopleTools Development at Oracle, spoke about PeopleSoft on the Oracle Cloud and how you can get there with PeopleSoft Cloud Manager 8.0. In his presentation, Nagendra covered Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), PeopleSoft on OCI, and PeopleSoft Cloud Manager 8.0 capabilities.

OCI Regions and Availability Domains

There are many OCI data centers spread across the globe. There are many commercial data centers already set up, a few government data centers, and more in the plans for both commercial and government.

OCI is hosted in regions, and these regions house Availability Domains. A region is just a localized geography carrier. An Availability Domain is one or more data center(s) located within that region. For example, London, England would be considered a region. Within London, there are multiple data centers in several different buildings. These data centers are the Availability Domains within the region.

Availability Domains are isolated from each another and are fault-tolerant. They are highly unlikely to simultaneously fail because they don’t share any infrastructures. A failure of one Availability Domain is unlikely to impact others. However, all Availability Domains are connected to all other data centers in the region by a low-latency, high-bandwidth network. This makes it possible for users to provide highly-available connectivity.

Regions are completely independent of other regions. This makes it easy to deploy heavily-used applications into localized regions where there are more consumers of that specific application.

Deploying these applications into different regions might be done for one of two main reasons:

1. Mitigate the risk of region-wide events.
2. Meet the requirements of legal jurisdictions, tax domains, and other business areas.

Benefits of Running PeopleSoft on OCI

There are several benefits of running PeopleSoft on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. For starters, the user is able to define their own networking in the Cloud. Users can easily mimic what they have in their on-premise data center and create a similar networking architecture in OCI. In addition, OCI gives users purpose-built database systems that vary in shape.

With OCI, users can provision many nodes or application servers that can scale up to the demanding workloads that they might have. In addition, you can manage incoming traffic confidently with OCI and load balancers.

All of these resources are provided under controlled, role-based access in OCI. This lets you decide what resources should be accessible by certain users.

Finally, the biggest benefit of running PeopleSoft on OCI is Cloud Manager Automation that is available for deploying PeopleSoft environments on OCI. This is done with the PeopleSoft Cloud Manager.

What Can the PeopleSoft Cloud Manager Do?

For starters, PeopleSoft Cloud Manager can automatically download PI/PRP/PeopleTools and stage them in Oracle Cloud. PeopleSoft Cloud Manager also provides the user with the necessary tools to create environments on demand and continually provision environments.

PeopleSoft Cloud Manager also provides users with an automated way of migrating environments to the Cloud—also known as a Lift and Shift. Users can download the provided Lift Utility and put it on their on-premise servers. Running this utility will package the on-premise environments and send them to Oracle Cloud. From there, PeopleSoft Cloud Manager can read that and start deploying your environments in OCI.

After you’ve migrated or created your environments in Oracle Cloud, PeopleSoft Cloud Manager provides the ability to run PeopleTools updates and upgrades on your environment in a fully automated fashion. Within a few hours, users can have their updated PeopleTools instances in Cloud.

In addition, users have the ability to start or stop all services in Cloud. This means that if you have test or development instances in which you don’t want to run 24/7, you can use PeopleSoft Cloud Manager to bring down instances when they are not in need. This helps cut down costs.

Finally, users can use PeopleSoft Cloud Manager to create master copies and clones of their environments in Cloud.

What’s New in PeopleSoft Cloud Manager 8.0

There were six new features included in the newest release of PeopleSoft Cloud Manager. The new features in PeopleSoft Cloud Manager 8.0 include:

• On-demand scaling of MT
• Import existing database instance
• Distributed MT and advanced domain configuration
• Custom script integration in provisioning flow
• RMAN-based Lift and Shift
• Bare metal DB System support

On-demand scaling of middle tier now has several key capabilities. Users can make the middle tier elastic, and they can add a middle tier during peak load or remove it when it’s not required. Users can also copy an existing middle tier configuration. In addition, users now have the ability to add windows client and add an elastic mode search.

There are also several key capabilities associated with importing existing database instances. Users can import a database that is created manually without Cloud Manager. It supports importing OCI DB Systems only. Users can also add middle tier and windows client after the import. In addition, users can run automated PeopleTools update and upgrade easily after import. Applying application updates is also possible now.

Several new features were made available to help users with distributed MT and advanced domain configuration. Users are now able to deploy production topology, and it is now possible to define middle tier services on separate VMs in a topology (App server, PIA server, and PRCS server). Users also have the ability to run a combination of App, PIA, and PRCS on a single VM, and they can run more than one domain for App, PIA, or PRCS domains on a single VM.

With new functionality for custom script integration in provisioning flow, users can execute user scripts during provisioning and configure custom scripts in templates and save them to be executed for every deployment. Running custom automation when migrating by Lift and Shift is another option available to users. PeopleSoft Cloud Manager 8.0 supports Python, Shell on Linus VM and bat scripts on Windows VM.

There are also new capabilities to assist with RMAN-based Lift and Shift. Users now have the ability to use RMAN backups to migrate on-premise databases.  PeopleSoft Cloud Manager 8.0 also allows Lifts to be run on live production databases and the ability to encrypt database backup that is transferred to the Cloud. Lifts are now quicker and more efficient using RMAN and use Oracle Cloud Backup Module.

Finally, there are new features for bare metal DB System support. There is support automated provisioning on OCI for bare metal shapes. Users can run databases on powerful bare metal DB systems without hypervisor. There is also better performance on bare metal and managing bare metal systems is now made as simple as managing a VM.

For more information, check out the full presentation from Nagendra attached below.

Additional Resources

To learn from the experiences of your peers within the Quest Oracle Community, check out the PeopleSoft Customer Stories page that houses 30+ PeopleSoft customer stories about Selective Adoption, user experience, PeopleSoft in the Cloud, PeopleSoft Human Capital Management, PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning, and PeopleSoft tools and technology!

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