Understanding the PeopleSoft Deployment Framework

Oracle recommends that you use the PeopleSoft Deployment Packages (DPKs) to install and configure your PeopleSoft environment. DPKs offer out-of-the-box functionality that greatly enhances the installation and configuration of your PeopleSoft environment, which is not available with the standard VCD installation.

DPKs allow fast deployment of a PeopleSoft environment on any hardware platform — physical hardware (“bare metal”) or virtual. The DPKs allow you to skip the manual steps associated with the following:

  • Gathering the necessary installation programs

  • Installing third-party products such as Oracle Tuxedo and WebLogic and the latest patches (CPUs)

  • Installing Application Home (PS_APP_HOME) (for PI DPKs)

  • Installing both PeopleTools and the PeopleTools patch binaries

  • Configuring the PeopleSoft domains

The DPKs can be installed on Oracle Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and on Microsoft Windows platforms supported by Oracle for PeopleSoft systems.

The DPKs include a setup script that deploys a default instance of each of the PeopleSoft mid-tier domains—PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture (PIA), Application Server and Process Scheduler domains. These domains are fully functional out-of-the-box. However, it is assumed that you will need to make changes to these deployments. These changes will be required to reflect your organizational standards, preferences, and customizations. DPKs set up your infrastructure for you—“infrastructure as a code,” which allows you to customize the environments to produce various topologies to serve different functionality, such as test environments, environments for performance testing or development environments, and so on. Notably, these customizations can be retained across maintenance application (upgrades, patches, and updates).

The best practice for environments deployed with the DPKs is to modify the environments using the methods provided by the PeopleSoft customizations. With the delivered customization method you have the ability to safely modify a wide variety of installation locations, integration definitions, and other configuration settings, while at the same time ensuring that the customizations are retained after applying software patches.

See Understanding Puppet and the PeopleSoft Modules

See the sections on customizing a PeopleSoft environment in the chapters on deploying the DPKs.

Using DPKs to create a PeopleTools middle-tier environment (Application Server, Process Scheduler, and PIA) typically takes less than 15 minutes. This allows for dynamic scaling and quick patching. With such fast creation of the middle-tier components, you can optimize hardware resources by creating middle-tier virtual machines (VMs) on demand. These VMs can be removed to release the resources when not in use, yet be quickly recreated as needed.

DPKs are integrated with PeopleSoft Automated Configuration Management (ACM) to provide PeopleSoft application configuration using plug-ins delivered by the PeopleSoft Application. For example, for all deployed environments, the Integration Broker and Gateway are set with ACM plug-ins.

DPKs allow for fast environment cloning. After creating an environment clone, you can use PeopleSoft ACM plug-ins to modify the configuration settings, such as those for Integration Broker, from those used in the original environment, to those required for the cloned environment, during the deployment of the middle-tier using PeopleTools DPK. DPKs can be used, to easily and effectively, create a fresh clone from your existing environments. Using database snap cloning, an environment clone can be achieved in less than 30 minutes.