Well those days are over. As of April 14, Oracle made pre-build virtual machines of PeopleSoft HCM 9.2, ELM 9.2 and FSCM 9.2 for VirtualBox available. These virtual machines enable you to get a PeopleSoft Demo up and running within an hour, without installation! No, I am not lying nor am I fooling you, I timed it! Customers do not have to invest time and effort in installing a Demo environment and developers can have a properly installed local environment for R&D.
In this post I will describe the steps you need to take to get started with the PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 virtual machine. I will be deploying the virtual machine on my laptop with following hardware:
- Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
- 8 GB RAM
In order to run the virtual machine, you need to have VirtualBox running. If you do not have it installed yet, download and install it.
The virtual machines can be downloaded from My Oracle Support, PeopleSoft Update Manager Home Page [ID 1464619.1].
Click on the link PeopleSoft HCM Demo Image link and you will be redirected to the Patches site.
These are the split file of the virtual machine. Download them all.
On the PeopleSoft Update Manager Home Page scroll down to the attachments sections and also download following highlighted document. It contains detailed information on the virtual machine deployment and maintenance.
After you have downloaded the files, extract the virtual machine split files. You end up with the following files.
These files have to merged first to one file. Open a command prompt and run following command:
copy /b HCMDB-SES-85302d.ova_1of7+HCMDB-SES-85302d.ova_2of7+HCMDB-SES-85302d.ova_3of7+HCMDB-SES-85302d.ova_4of7+HCMDB-SES-85302d.ova_5of7+HCMDB-SES-85302d.ova_6of7+HCMDB-SES-85302d.ova_7of7 HCMDB-SES-85302d.ova
After this you will have the ova file, which you can import in VirtualBox.
To clear some space on your hard disk, you can delete all above files, except the ova file off course.
Start VirtualBox and from the menu select Import Appliance
On the next screen select the ova file.
On the Appliance screen make sure to check Reinitialize the MAC address
Click on Import. This import took about half an hour on my laptop.
When the virtual machine is imported, you can see that the virtual hard disks have been created with a total size of 55 GB. So, prior to staring this step, make sure you have enough hard disk space available. At this time you can also delete the ova file if you wish to, to clear some hard disk space.
The virtual machine is pre-configured with the following settings.
It is configured to run with 4 GB RAM. Besides PeopleSoft, the virtual machine also contains Secure Enterprise Search. If you plan to use SES, it is recommended to increase this to at least 6 GB. Also note that the virtual machine is configured with a Host-Only network adapter. This will allow the virtual machine to communicate with the host, which is good enough for a local sandbox. If you plan to make it accessible from a corporate or home network, you need to use the Bridged network adapter. I will use it as a local sandbox, so I will keep the Host-only network adapter and increase the RAM allocation to 6 GB. After this click on the Start icon and the virtual machine will start. Not so long after this you will be prompted some configuration questions.
I think the answer to the first question is obvious.
Next you are prompted to set the password for the root account.
Next select to use a static or dynamic IP address. I first tried setting a static IP address, but the script prompted me for the ip address, subnet and gateway. With a Host-only adapter you do not need to provide a gateway, but the script would not accept this??? So I switched back to have a dynamic ip address.
If you want to proceed configuring a Host-only adapter, you can provide the same ip address for the gateway and DNS server as your guest ip address.
Next set your hostname. I chose to set it to hcm92.ps.com
Next you can change you PeopleSoft database name. I kept it default.
Finally you are prompted if you want to setup SES. I was very impressed by SES and the integration with PeopleSoft in PeopleTools 8.52, so I definitely want SES to be configured on this VM.
After this all the PeopleSoft and SES components are configured and are being started.
This process took another half hours. Why did it took half an hour? I will explain this later on.
On my laptop I modified by hosts file and added the following line
192.168.56.101 hcm92.ps.com
Now you can start your favorite browser and go to the PeopleSoft signon page
http://hcm92.ps.com:8000/ps/signon.html
In fact your are now done and have a PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 Demo environment running!
Usually after installation you have to preform some manual configuration steps. Now this amazed me the most of the this virtual machine. Everything is configured.
Report node
Integration Broker
Default Local Node
My own WOW moment
SES configuration in PeopleSoft and SES
And this why the configuration took half an hour. The search indexes are all deployed, build and crawled. SES immediate works after starting your virtual machine.
What was not configured what I added manually:
Web Profile
On the used web profile, I have added the authentication domain and the PeopleSoft Help url to the Hosted PeopleBooks. The documentation states the authentication domain would have been set automatically if you configured the virtual machine with a static ip address.
ANONYMOUS NODE
The ANONYMOUS node was set to user @userpass@. I have changed this to PS.
Using Application Designer
If you are a developer or if you want to have a look at the source objects of PeopleSoft you can install PeopleTools Client on your host or on another Windows virtual machine. The installation files for PeopleTools Client and Oracle Client are also available on the virtual machine. I will install these on host (my laptop).
Start windows explorer and type \192.168.56.101
On the provided shares copy the folder oracle-client to you host. Do not copy client! This contains PeopleTools Client, where the installer requires to run from the virtual machine.
In the copied oracle-client folder, extract oracle-client-mswin-x86-32.zip. In the extracted folder start the installer.
Choose Runtime as installation type.
Provide the installation directory. We will be needing this for the Configuration Manager later on.
Finish the installer and from the copied oracle-client folder locate the tnsnames.ora and copy it to$ORACLE_HOMEnetworkadmin on the host. In my case this is D:appsoracleproduct11.2.0client_1networkadmin.
Verify connectivity
Open a command prompt and type sqlplus SYSADM/SYSADM@HR92DM00
SQL Developer
For those who want to use SQL Developer, it is also part of the Oracle Client installation. In the Windows Start menu, you will also find SQL Developer. When you start it for the first time, it will prompt you for the java path.
Use the jdk folder that is part of the Oracle Client installation.
After this create a new connection to the PeopleSoft database, using the settings as shown above. You can now start the PeopleTools Client installer.
Install PeopleTools Client
In the shares folder start the setup.bat installer in the clientDisk1 folder.
On the license code screen enter the PeopleTools license code, available from http://licensecodes.oracle.com/
Finish the installer and start Configuration Manager from the Windows start menu.
On the Startup tab set Database name, userid, connectID to people and password to peop1e.
Go to tab Profile and provide the Oracle Client path
Now you are all ready to start using Application Designer and use PeopleSoft.
I want to thank everyone from Oracle that had any role in making this virtual machine available. It is really amazing with which ease you can have a Demo environment running.
If you are not that comfortable with Linux and would rather have a GUI, have a look at the following post Extending the PeopleSoft 9.2 virtual machine with GUI and Guest Additions
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