Purchasing and activating your Puppet Enterprise license

The Puppet Enterprise license gives you access to Security Compliance Management (formerly Puppet Comply) and Continuous Delivery.

With the Puppet Enterprise Advanced license, you gain access to additional premium features: Security Compliance Enforcement, Advanced Patching service, and advanced capabilities for the Impact Analysis feature in Continuous Delivery.

Security Compliance Enforcement and advanced Impact Analysis capabilities are also available for individual purchase with a standard license.

Your license must support the number of nodes that you want to manage with Puppet Enterprise.

Trial license

To try out Puppet Enterprise (PE), you can manage up to 10 nodes at no charge, and no license key is needed. When you have 11 or more active nodes and no license key, license warnings appear in the console until you install an appropriate license key.

Purchased license

To manage 11 or more active nodes, you must purchase a license. After you purchase a license and install a license key file, your licensed node count and subscription expiration date appear on the License page.

Note: To support occasional spikes in node usage, you have a bursting quota. This means that on up to four days each calendar month you can exceed your licensed node count up to your bursting limit, which is double the number of your licensed nodes. If you exceed the bursting quota by using additional nodes on more than four days in a calendar month, or exceed the bursting limit at any time, you must purchase more nodes for your license. In these cases, license warnings appear in the console until you contact your Puppet representative.

Getting a license

Contact our sales team to purchase a new license, renew your license, upgrade to Puppet Enterprise Advanced, or increase your licensed nodes.

A standard Puppet Enterprise license includes Security Compliance Management (formerly Comply) and Continuous Delivery. You can choose the Puppet Enterprise Advanced license to unlock the following premium features:

Impact Analysis: By enabling the advanced capabilities of this feature within Continuous Delivery, you can generate reports to analyze the potential impact and risks before merging new Puppet code.
Security Compliance Enforcement (formerly CEM): Ensure that your server configurations comply with the security best practices outlined in the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks.
Advanced Patching: By enabling this advanced patch management service, you have access to advanced patching capabilities on the PE console and API.

Note: Security Compliance Enforcement and advanced Impact Analysis capabilities are also available for individual purchase with a standard license.

Tip: To reduce your active node count and free up licenses, remove inactive nodes from your deployment. By default, nodes with Puppet agents are automatically deactivated after seven days with no activity (no new facts, catalog, or reports).

Install a license key

Install the suite-license.lic file to upgrade from a trial installation.

Install the license key by copying the file to /etc/puppetlabs/suite-license.lic on the primary server node.
Verify that Puppet has permission to read the license key by checking its ownership and permissions:
```
ls -la /etc/puppetlabs/suite-license.lic
```

If the ownership is not root and permissions are not -rw-r--r-- (octal 644), set them:

sudo chown root:root /etc/puppetlabs/suite-license.lic
sudo chmod 644 /etc/puppetlabs/suite-license.lic

View your license details

Check the number of active nodes in your deployment, the number of licensed nodes you purchased, and the expiration date for your license.

In the console, click License.

Results

The License page opens with information on your licensed nodes, bursting quota, and subscription expiration date. Any license warnings that appear in the console navigation are explained on the License page. For example, warning messages appear if your license is expired or out of compliance.