PeopleSoft in the Cloud / Amazon EC2 June 30, 2010
Posted by Duncan in Administration, PeopleTools, Strategy, Virtualisation.trackback
We’ve been trying out Amazon’s EC2 (aka Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, aaka Amazon Web Services) for some of our PeopleSoft instances.
The advantages that this setup gives us are:
- Global access (we don’t need to be in a certain office or use a VPN to get to PeopleSoft)
- Flexibility (we don’t need to buy all of the kit in advance and then wait a month for the servers to arrive)
- Hourly pricing (you only pay for the server when it’s booted)
- Processing power (we’ve found that the hardware performs pretty well compared to other – more traditional – hosting providers)
- Price (the amount of horsepower you get for your money compares well)
- Frighteningly fast bandwidth (want to download the latest Tools patch … it’ll only take a few minutes!)
We’ve been using Windows 2008 and MS SQL 2008, however there’s nothing stopping anyone going Linux/Oracle. We are running 7 environments with all of the PeopleSoft tiers on a single server with the following specs:
High-Memory Extra Large Instance
17.1 GB of memory
6.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
420 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
All things considered, we’re pretty pleased with how it has gone. There have been some issues however:
– VPN access:
I’ve spent a lot of time struggling with Windows RRAS (Routing and Remote Access) trying to get a reasonable VPN for developers to use to access the backend (SQL Server Management Studio, App Designer etc). Although I can get the VPN to work, the server frequently disappeared from the network (even other servers in the Amazon Cloud couldn’t ping it). There are many others on the Amazon forums with the same issue, so I gave up and used a different route for developer access (RDP into smaller ‘satellite’ servers with PeopleTools already installed).
– 3-Tier Debugger
This doesn’t seem to work between the satellite servers and the PeopleSoft server, even with all firewalls turned off. I’ve never had a problem configuring this before and I’m at a loss to explain why it doesn’t work. We have a perfectly acceptable workaround so this isn’t a big problem.
– Config Manager Settings
On some of the servers the Config Manager settings don’t persist, even when logged in as an Administrator (and running the app as administrator).
I’ll probably add to this post over time as we get more experience with it, and I’d be interested to hear from others who’ve been trying similar things.
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The PeopleSoft Tipster Blog 
Interesting..Very useful information
Hi sir
We also used same for one if our client demo .The overall exp was just awesome, only issue we faced is RDP of machine through client network.We had to work with client network team and rest was fine.I strongly recommend the amazon guys.
“Global access (we don’t need to be in a certain office or use a VPN to get to PeopleSoft)”
Maybe you should re-think that…
I assume you mean from a security point of view? Perhaps I should clarify. We need to connect in to AWS to get to any developer tools, it’s only the PIA that’s exposed. And even that is well firewalled, we have password controls in place and regular backups if something does go wrong.
And if the worst happens, it’s only DMO, DEV etc. Not Production!
How does this work? Does Amazon have a template service that can easily install PIA, or are you treating it as a server in the cloud and then you’re uploading and installing the PS software on your own?
You start off with a base machine that you install PeopleSoft on. You can create your own AMIs (templates) to shortcut the process once you have a machine setup. Oracle have said that they will providing AMIs also.
Thanks Tipster. What is the estimated cost to host a DMO environment of either HCM or Financials on the cloud on a monthly basis?
It depends on the size of the environment you need. The currently available sizes are here:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
The smallest machines are Linux: $0.085 per hour, Windows: $0.12 per hour.
Duncan, this is really good to know more people are trying this in the cloud. I’ve done some proof of concepts a while back in 2009 on AWS and found the performance to be quite reasonable.
I’d be interested to hear your experiences re: the data. Are the clients amenable to having their data in the cloud (Dev/Test) etc?
Also, did you ever try out the VPC offering by Amazon? It costs extra but then you won’t have to worry about VPN to a given server etc.
Thanks for sharing!
Tipster
Have you tried the Oracle PeopleSoft AMIs? I can’t find much in the way of documentation or a getting started guide. I’ve started up a DB and a PeopleTools instance and explored a bit, but have not gotten much farther. They don’t seem to be fully configured, but, hey, I’m not really a PS Admin.
Do I need to go back and read the PS install and admin docs to get started?
Cheers
Dan
I haven’t tried their pre-built AMIs. At the moment I’ve just stuck to Windows/MSSQL as that’s where I’m most comfortable, but we’ll definitely try Linux/Oracle in the future. Also, the AMIs require you to have more than one machine, whereas if you build your own you can put the entire stack on a single box as save a bit of money (clearly this isn’t appropriate for Production, but if you just need low volume environments like Dev, Test etc it’s fine).
Duncan
PS on the Linux/Oracle platform works really well. Rock solid as you would expect since Oracle builds their products on Linux and Oracle first.
Any idea what the Authentication Domain would be to get Related Content to work?
That would depend upon your DNS setup. We set our instances up within the *.succeed.co.uk domain, so one might be http://demo.succeed.co.uk. The DNS name points to the elastic IP address assigned to the EC2 instance.
Hi
Has anybody installed a Peoplesoft HCM 9.0 template on amazon?Amazon doesnt have a pre-built AMI for HCM module.