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We are considering implementing PingFederate as an IdP.

PingFederate can also act as an SP - is it recommended that PingFederate, when acts as an SP, be hosted on a separate server from the PingFederate instance acting as the IdP.

We are an educational institution, it is likely that some of our integration applications, to the PingFederate IdP, will not have budget to purchase PingFederate licenses for SP. Do you use the open source SP from Internet2?

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You can easily run PingFed in the IDP and SP role on the same server with the same PF server instance. It is not required to separate them. I would suggest talking with Regional Solutions Architect from Ping Identity to help identify the best setup for your institution.


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Pardon my ignorance, won't running the IdP and SP on same server seem to defeat the purpose of using SAML? –  user353829 Apr 17 '12 at 16:41
Not necessarily. It just depends on your use case(s). Many of our customers (Note: I work for Ping) have 3rd Party SPs and IDPs for various business use cases they need to support where they run the IDP and SP role on the same PF instance. Again, it is not required to separate them but it may make sense in different scenarios. –  Ian Apr 18 '12 at 15:46

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