Oracle released PeopleTools 8.60 on OCI on Friday 14 October and naturally we at Version 1 were keen to get our hands on this very exciting release. Since PeopleTools 8.57 Oracle have used PeopleSoft Cloud Manager platform to make the software available and 8.60 is no different.
If you don't run PeopleSoft in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) then it's likely that you don't have PeopleSoft Cloud Manager (PCM) (NOTE: PCM only runs on OCI) . But, PeopleSoft Cloud Manager has significant value to organisations wanting to get early access to new PeopleTools releases and you don't need to wait until you've migrated your entire PeopleSoft system to OCI to start taking advantage of Cloud Manager. I've written a number of blogs on my experiences with PCM over the years and I highly recommend it. Getting setup in OCI with PCM is pretty straight forward and the team at Version 1 would be more than happy to help, wherever you are in the world, if it's something you're interested in.
Here's a few significant things that you may find useful.
(1) PeopleTools 8.60 can only be downloaded and accessed using PeopleSoft Cloud Manager. We're expecting it to be available for download for on-prem use from patch 02 or maybe patch 04 onwards. (This is probably sometime early in December 2022 or early in 2023 if the current cadence of patch releases continues at an average of 47 days between releases). I guess this is Oracle encouraging customers to take a look at OCI. There's a compelling argument for running PeopleSoft on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure but that's not what this blog post is about. I'm actually speaking on this subject at the upcoming Pathlock PeopleSoft Innovations Day on 7 December if you're interested to hear more you can register for free.
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| Magic Upgrade Button |
(3) Current PeopleSoft Images (HCM 044, FSCM 045 and CS 027) are shipped on PeopleTools 8.59. This means that you need to use Cloud Manager to perform a PeopleTools Upgrade to get to 8.60. I expect that future releases of Update Images will start to ship on 8.60 natively now that 8.60 is GA.
There's a short video below showing one my HCM 043 environments being upgraded from 8.59.10 to 8.60.01.
(4) CM14 may fail to provision a new environment. This started happening to new CM environments after HCM 043 was released. If this happens to you then MOS Doc ID 2902243.1 might help.
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| MOS Doc ID 2902243.1 Resolution |
(5) More Linux swap space is required to perform the 8.60 upgrade than previous upgrades. The upgrade to 8.60 will fail with the following error if this happens:
Some requirement checks failed. You must fulfill these requirements before continuing with the installation,
The easiest fix for this is BEFORE you start the Cloud Manager upgrade of the target environment use the OCI console to change the shape of the target Linux instance to a VM.Standard2.2. This will increase OCPU to 2 and explicitly allocate more swap space. You can drop the shape down to 1 OCPU once you've finished the upgrade. Of course, it's probably better to use Flex Shapes so that you can allocate more memory whilst still keeping the OCPU level at 1.
(6) There is a new security feature released in the October CPUs for PeopleTools which affects environments that are using a public DNS entry or are behind a load balancer or proxy. You can read the resolution in MOS DocID 2904753.1. If you've just upgraded an 8.59 environment to 8.60 using Cloud Manager then when you try and login to the upgraded environment you'll get the error
"Your URL must contain domain ".xxx.xxx" Click Sign in to PeopleSoft to try again."
You'll get this even if your URL does contain the correct domain name.
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| Signin Error Caused by Oracle October CPU |
The fix for this issue/feature is to add the HOSTNAME into the Virtual Addressing section of the Web Profile. In my case I would not normally have used virtual addressing as my web server is not behind a load balancer or proxy. However, it seems that with this recent "security enhancement" I do.
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| MOS Doc ID 2904753.1 Resolution |
(7) Elasticsearch and Kibana may not start-up. If your Cloud Manager environment has an ELK node then this will be upgraded and patched during the 8.60 upgrade process. If you use Cloud Manager to START the environment then Elastic and Kibana will also be started. However, if you start the compute instance using the OCI console then Elastic and Kibana will NOT startup automatically. I don't know why all the PeopleSoft mid-tier components use Linux services but ELK does not. ELK will only start if you start the environment through Cloud Manager.
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| ELK will only start if you start using CM |
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