Run PeopleSoft ERP and Autonomous Database in an HA Multicloud Deployment
An Oracle partner deployed an Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) database in its Oracle PeopleSoft instance on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which it can scale out during month-end closes and then scale back in during normal traffic cycles.
After migrating its on-premises PeopleSoft ERP application to OCI, they provisioned ATP on Dedicated Infrastructure to full cut-over, taking approximately three months, with little downtime. Since migrating PeopleSoft to OCI and deploying ATP, the partner has:
- Reduced the number of provisioned OCPUs by 66% by using a dedicated Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing database with autoscaling, leading to a 20% to 30% cost savings in database management
- Saved 60 to 80 man-hours per quarter by managing databases through automation and reinvested that time in value-added activities
Architecture
The Oracle partner has built and deployed a highly-available Oracle PeopleSoft application using two availability domains in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) region in Ashburn. They use the Phoenix region as a standby region for Oracle Autonomous Database and as a disaster recovery site.
Each of the web and application virtual machine (VM) instances are configured as a high availability pair by using load balancers and by being placed in different availability domains (AD). Each of the load balancers handles certain PeopleSoft functions and URLs.
Separate instances of Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing on Dedicated Infrastructure (ATP-D) are created for each of the PeopleSoft functions: Financials, Phire, Vertex, and Human Capital Management (HCM). Oracle Data Guard is used to replicate the primary databases in Ashburn to standby databases in Phoenix.
They have also built and deployed development (DEV), user acceptance test (UAT), quality assurance (QA), and test environments in the Phoenix region. Oracle Data Guard and RackWare are also used for the DEV, UAT, QA, and test environments.
Windows Servers with file shares are used to store PeopleSoft configuration files. Users are able to access PeopleSoft by using the Internet through an internet gateway or from the partner private network by using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect to connect to the load balancers. After connecting to the load balancers, users are redirected to an OKTA Access Gateway (OAG). The OAG is used for access authentication and single sign-on (SSO) before allowing users to access PeopleSoft.
The move to OCI involved first migrating its PeopleSoft web/application tier and Oracle Database to Oracle Exadata Database Service. After realizing the benefits of ATP, the partner successfully migrated its 7 TB PeopleSoft database to Oracle Autonomous Database. They recognized ease of maintenance and operation of Autonomous Database as key benefits for their modernization effort.
The following diagram illustrates the migration process:
peoplesoft-migration-process-oracle.zip
The partner has built a multicloud architecture that integrates with banking systems, SaaS applications, Microsoft Azure for Active Directory single sign-on (SSO), and MuleSoft (SaaS) for data integration. These integrations connect to Oracle Cloud through their data center private network by using a customer-premises router and then connect into the virtual cloud network (VCN) by using ATP.
For disaster recovery, they use Oracle Data Guard to replicate databases to the Phoenix region and uses Oracle Cloud Marketplace partner RackWare to take snapshots of VM instances. This allows them to quickly recover in another region and continue operations in case of a disaster event.
To continue their cloud modernization and maturation journey, the partner has future plans to move more systems into cloud native services to reduce the amount of patching, upgrades, and maintenance required.
The following diagram illustrates this reference architecture.
peoplesoft-prod-oci-oracle.zip
The architecture has the following components:
- Tenancy
A tenancy is a secure and isolated partition that Oracle sets up within Oracle Cloud when you sign up for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. You can create, organize, and administer your resources in Oracle Cloud within your tenancy. A tenancy is synonymous with a company or organization. Usually, a company will have a single tenancy and reflect its organizational structure within that tenancy. A single tenancy is usually associated with a single subscription, and a single subscription usually only has one tenancy.
- Region
An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, called availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them (across countries or even continents).
- Audit
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Audit service automatically records calls to all supported Oracle Cloud Infrastructure public application programming interface (API) endpoints as log events. All OCI services support logging by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Audit.
- Policy
An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management policy specifies who can access which resources, and how. Access is granted at the group and compartment level, which means you can write a policy that gives a group a specific type of access within a specific compartment, or to the tenancy.
- LoggingOracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging is a highly-scalable and fully-managed service that provides access to the following types of logs from your resources in the cloud:
- Audit logs: Logs related to events produced by OCI Audit.
- Service logs: Logs published by individual services such as OCI API Gateway, OCI Events, OCI Functions, OCI Load Balancing, OCI Object Storage, and VCN flow logs.
- Custom logs: Logs that contain diagnostic information from custom applications, other cloud providers, or an on-premises environment.
- Object storage
OCI Object Storage provides quick access to large amounts of structured and unstructured data of any content type, including database backups, analytic data, and rich content such as images and videos. You can safely and securely store data directly from the internet or from within the cloud platform. You can scale storage without experiencing any degradation in performance or service reliability.
Use standard storage for "hot" storage that you need to access quickly, immediately, and frequently. Use archive storage for "cold" storage that you retain for long periods of time and seldom or rarely access.
- Compartment
Compartments are cross-regional logical partitions within an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy. Use compartments to organize, control access, and set usage quotas for your Oracle Cloud resources. In a given compartment, you define policies that control access and set privileges for resources.
- Availability domain
Availability domains are standalone, independent data centers within a region. The physical resources in each availability domain are isolated from the resources in the other availability domains, which provides fault tolerance. Availability domains don’t share infrastructure such as power or cooling, or the internal availability domain network. So, a failure at one availability domain shouldn't affect the other availability domains in the region.
- Virtual cloud network (VCN) and subnets
A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple non-overlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which can be scoped to a region or to an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don't overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.
- Security list
For each subnet, you can create security rules that specify the source, destination, and type of traffic that must be allowed in and out of the subnet.
- Route table
Virtual route tables contain rules to route traffic from subnets to destinations outside a VCN, typically through gateways.
- Internet gateway
An internet gateway allows traffic between the public subnets in a VCN and the public internet.
- Dynamic routing gateway (DRG)
The DRG is a virtual router that provides a path for private network traffic between VCNs in the same region, between a VCN and a network outside the region, such as a VCN in another Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region, an on-premises network, or a network in another cloud provider.
- Service gateway
The service gateway provides access from a VCN to other services, such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage. The traffic from the VCN to the Oracle service travels over the Oracle network fabric and does not traverse the internet.
- FastConnect
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect creates a dedicated, private connection between your data center and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. FastConnect provides higher-bandwidth options and a more reliable networking experience when compared with internet-based connections.
- Load balancer
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancing provides automated traffic distribution from a single entry point to multiple servers.
- Compute
With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute, you can provision and manage compute hosts in the cloud. You can launch compute instances with shapes that meet your resource requirements for CPU, memory, network bandwidth, and storage. After creating a compute instance, you can access it securely, restart it, attach and detach volumes, and terminate it when you no longer need it.
- File storage
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure File Storage provides a durable, scalable, secure, enterprise-grade network file system. You can connect to OCI File Storage from any bare metal, virtual machine, or container instance in a VCN. You can also access OCI File Storage from outside the VCN by using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect and IPSec VPN.
- Autonomous Database
Oracle Autonomous Database is a fully-managed, preconfigured database environment that you can use for transaction processing and data warehousing workloads. You do not need to configure or manage any hardware, or install any software. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure handles creating, backing up, patching, upgrading, and tuning the database.
- Autonomous Transaction
Processing
Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing is a self-driving, self-securing, self-repairing database service that is optimized for transaction processing workloads. You do not need to configure or manage any hardware, or install any software. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure handles creating, backing up, patching, upgrading, and tuning the database.
- Exadata Database Service
enables you to leverage the power of Exadata in the cloud. Oracle Exadata Database Service delivers proven Oracle Database capabilities on purpose-built, optimized Oracle Exadata infrastructure in the public cloud. Built-in cloud automation, elastic resource scaling, security, and fast performance for all Oracle Database workloads helps you simplify management and reduce costs.
- Data Guard
Oracle Data Guard and Oracle Active Data Guard provide a comprehensive set of services that create, maintain, manage, and monitor one or more standby databases and that enable production Oracle databases to remain available without interruption. Oracle Data Guard maintains these standby databases as copies of the production database by using in-memory replication. If the production database becomes unavailable due to a planned or an unplanned outage, Oracle Data Guard can switch any standby database to the production role, minimizing the downtime associated with the outage. Oracle Active Data Guard provides the additional ability to offload read-mostly workloads to standby databases and also provides advanced data protection features.