When you map a network drive to the Samba share of a VirtualBox PUM VM in order to install (say) the PeopleTools client, the mapped drive may be invisible to your cmd prompt running as Administrator – something you need in order to update the registry and install the client software.
To work around this on Windows 7 through 10, see this article:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee844140(v=ws.10).aspx
One of the slightly irritating parts of the build of a VirtualBox VM using the PUM downloads is the fact that the build script copies the DPK files into the VM prior to unpacking them. The data is stored under /opt/oracle/psft/dpk which is a mount point for “disk2”. Typically this disk expands to 23GB+ during the build process as a result of this approach.
To reduce the size of the VMs, what I like to do after the VM has been built is to:
I then close down the VM, detach the .vmdk files and clone the .vmdk disk files to .vdi files using virtual media manager. This has the effect of shrinking the resulting files – essentially doing a “VBoxManage modifyhd {vdi_file} –compact“.
Once I have the .vdi versions of the files, I remove the .vmdk files from the PeopleSoft VM, add back the .vdi files, boot the PeopleSoft VM, test it and delete the original .vmdk files if everything works.
In general, this approach releases approximately 27 Gb per VM – making the resulting VMs around 30-36 Gb. Still absurdly big of course 🙂
Even though my laptop has a decent 12 Gb of RAM, I still like to minimise the RAM allocated to PeopleSoft VMs.
My experience is that the sweet spot is 3072 Mb for VMs without SES – I never bother with the beast that is SES. After all it is a dead application – Elasticsearch cannot arrive soon enough for me. You can get away with 2560 Mb of RAM but you will see some swapping in OEL – not good even if you have a fast SSD. Mine is “ok” – a Samsung 1 TB 850 EVO but allowing any swapping still makes the system slow down considerably.
If you get errors installing OpenSUSE as a VirtualBox guest, check the memory allocated. By default VirtualBox will allocate 512MB of RAM to the VM – you need more to install OpenSUSE e.g.
Note: This was an install of 13.2 with KDE
If you are encountering this error installing the x64 version of VirtualBox on Windows 7, then there is a good chance it is because the MSI installer service is trying to execute a custom action in 32-bit mode. The error message about the Windows Installer is somewhat misleading in this case.
To verify this is the case, run the VirtualBox executable from a command prompt with the /logging parameter and review the logfile created. If this is the cause of the problem, you will see an error like this in the log:
MSI (s) (DC:98) [12:00:00:000]: Custom Action Server rejected – Wrong Context
MSI (s) (DC:B8) [12:00:00:001]: CA Server Process has terminated.
The fix is a very simple Windows Registry change using to set the WOW64 entry to 0 (zero) for the msiserver i.e.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msiserver]
WOW64=0
Note: For the change to take effect, the Windows Installer Service must be restarted under Services.
There is a more detailed explanation by Aaron Stebner over on MSDN:Â http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2011/05/16/10165211.aspx
If you need to re-start the Peoplesoft configuration process for an Update Manager Virtualbox VM, then you can do so by logging in as root and setting the VBOX_SETUP environment variable to “1” before running the VM template shell script e.g.
export VBOX_SETUP=1 ./opt/oracle/psft/vm/oracle-template.sh |
Note that if you had previously created the APPDOM/PRCSDOM domains then you will need to delete them prior to re-starting the configuration script or it will fail.