Dell TPAM – The Privileged Appliance and Modules (formerly Quest Total Privileged Access Management) has four (4) modules:
- PPM – Privileged Password Manager
- PSM – Privileged Session Manager
- APM – Application Password Manager
- PCM – Privileged Command Manager
Licensing for PPM is based on the number of Managed Systems while PSM is based on the number of Concurrent Sessions. Most organizations set these license limits in the License Management view of TPAM’s Admin interface to ensure that actual usage will not go over the purchased number of licenses. These organizations also tend to take advantage of the auto-discovery feature of the appliance to facilitate the addition of managed systems, accounts and users to TPAM.
By default, every auto-discovered system uses a PPM license. It is also important to note that increasing the number of MaxSystems in TPAM’s license management view has cost implications. This causes most organizations having a large number of target systems to encounter licensing issues like:
- Auto-discovering systems stops at the number of MaxSystems configured in the license management view of TPAM.
- Increasing license limits can cause organizations to buy additional PPM licenses to cover their auto-discovered systems.
- Using up “unnecessary” PPM licenses for auto-discovered systems that are intended for PSM only.
To avoid these issues and to ensure that purchased licenses are used efficiently during auto-discovery of systems, create a system template that disables the PPM license usage. To do this, ensure that the “Disable all PPM functions and delete any existing password history or secure stored files?” check-box is selected in the system template. It will allow the auto-discovery of all the systems from a certain container without using up a PPM license. These will then be added in the pool of TPAM managed systems where PPM functions can be enabled later on.
