Make Puppet Enterprise licenses that are not being used available to other nodes

By removing inactive nodes from PuppetDB, you make their Puppet Enterprise licenses available to other, active nodes. Learn how to do that either right away manually or automatically after the nodes become inactive (are not generating new catalogs, facts, or reports).

Version and installation information

PE version: All supported versions

Solution

To make PE licenses available to other nodes right away manually, use the node purge command to mark nodes as deactivated and remove them from PE management. The nodes are no longer shown in the console and do not use licenses. Using node purge does not uninstall agent software from the node. Learn more from our documentation.

To make PE licenses available to other nodes that are inactive automatically, use the node-ttl setting to deactivate inactive nodes and node-purge-ttl setting to remove expired nodes from PuppetDB on the first garbage collection after a specified time. Neither setting affects nodes immediately. Once the nodes are removed from PuppetDB by node-purge-ttl, their licenses are available for other nodes. Learn more about how to set the values for node-ttl and node-purge-ttl and when they take effect.