Puppet Enterprise vs. Open Source

Solution 1:

It depends on your authentication and user management infrastructure. Puppet Enterprise can do user management in LDAP, AD and apparently Google. See here: http://puppetlabs.com/blog/puppet-enterprise-2-6-is-now-available/

If you use none of that and just want to manage /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, i.e. local users, or if you are proficient enough to implement your own Puppet module to manage your LDAP/AD users, then you certainly don't need Puppet Enterprise. Puppet has built-in support for users and groups, see here: https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/latest/type.html#user and here: https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/latest/type.html#group

This blog post is also interesting for efficiently managing local user accounts: http://www.craigdunn.org/2011/03/puppet-working-with-define-based-virtuals/

You can always install the latest Puppet packages from the official Puppetlabs repos: http://yum.puppetlabs.com/ and http://apt.puppetlabs.com/. And no, Puppet packages in Ubuntu are not based on Puppet Enterprise.