Together with PeopleSoft 9.2, Oracle announced the new Continuous Delivery model for delivering patches, based on PeopleSoft Update Manager. The new model allows customers to choose which fixes or enhancements they are interested in, and then just extract the objects related to them and their prerequisites.
The following diagram outlines the process of applying an update using this new delivery model:
In order to apply a change in your Development environment, you would to follow these steps:
Many customers find that the first 4 steps in the process take too much time, particularly when the intention is to apply a single regulatory update or enhancement. In the past, the customer would just download the patch and its prerequisites (which in many cases, for regulatory patches, were already applied) and starts the updating process. The new process requires to invest at least a day in downloading, uncompressing and installing the virtual machine.
On top of the time issues, the virtual machine can only run in a physical box with certain prerequisites. In these times when many organizations have moved to virtualization, it is not always easy to allocate the needed hardware to host the virtual machines.
BNB has conducted a successful Proof of Concept for one of our customers to install the latest Update Image on an Amazon EC2 server and use it to apply the latest patches.
Initially, we had some concerns about if this idea could work with a good performance. After our first real run, we can conclude that the performance is more than acceptable. The new Change Assistant in PeopleTools 8.54 is helping a lot, as it allows to run source and target steps separately. In this way, the source steps can be run in a Windows Amazon EC2 server sitting close to the Update Image, with the obvious performance gains. Still there will be some connectivity needed between your site and the Amazon EC2 servers, mainly to:
We also faced some challenges in converting the Virtual Box delivered virtual machine into an Amazon EC2 hosted machine. We could eventually solve them and now we have created an AMI to quickly deploy new instances for other PeopleSoft customers. We have also tested the conversion steps multiple times, so we should now be able to have the AMI available just one day after the Update Image is made available by Oracle.
Note: Since the introduction of PeopleSoft 8.55 and DPK, it has become considerably easier to deploy Update Images in cloud infrastructure. Please check this blog post for more information on this.
The following diagram outlines the process of applying an update using this new delivery model:
In order to apply a change in your Development environment, you would to follow these steps:
- Download the latest Update Image from My Oracle Support. The latest images have a size of around 35 Gb for PeopleSoft HCM and for FSCM.
- Run a script to unzip the downloaded files and combine them into a single virtual appliance file (.ova).
- Import the .ova file into Virtual Box in order to create the virtual machine.
- Start the virtual machine and follow the installation steps so it can be used.
- Using PeopleSoft Change Assistant, upload your environment information into PeopleSoft Update Manager.
- Connect to the virtual machine environment in order to choose which patches or enhancements are going to be applied. The selected patches conform an Change Package.
- Run the source steps in the Change Package against the Update Image.
- Run the target steps included in the Change Package against the target environment.
Many customers find that the first 4 steps in the process take too much time, particularly when the intention is to apply a single regulatory update or enhancement. In the past, the customer would just download the patch and its prerequisites (which in many cases, for regulatory patches, were already applied) and starts the updating process. The new process requires to invest at least a day in downloading, uncompressing and installing the virtual machine.
On top of the time issues, the virtual machine can only run in a physical box with certain prerequisites. In these times when many organizations have moved to virtualization, it is not always easy to allocate the needed hardware to host the virtual machines.
BNB has conducted a successful Proof of Concept for one of our customers to install the latest Update Image on an Amazon EC2 server and use it to apply the latest patches.
Initially, we had some concerns about if this idea could work with a good performance. After our first real run, we can conclude that the performance is more than acceptable. The new Change Assistant in PeopleTools 8.54 is helping a lot, as it allows to run source and target steps separately. In this way, the source steps can be run in a Windows Amazon EC2 server sitting close to the Update Image, with the obvious performance gains. Still there will be some connectivity needed between your site and the Amazon EC2 servers, mainly to:
- Upload target environment information from your server into the Update Image.
- Download the Oracle Database and PeopleTools clients.
- Download the Change Package once the source steps are finished.
We also faced some challenges in converting the Virtual Box delivered virtual machine into an Amazon EC2 hosted machine. We could eventually solve them and now we have created an AMI to quickly deploy new instances for other PeopleSoft customers. We have also tested the conversion steps multiple times, so we should now be able to have the AMI available just one day after the Update Image is made available by Oracle.
Note: Since the introduction of PeopleSoft 8.55 and DPK, it has become considerably easier to deploy Update Images in cloud infrastructure. Please check this blog post for more information on this.