AD and redundant print servers

  • Thread starter Thread starter KM
  • Start date Start date
K

KM

Greetings,

I am attempting to set up a redundant print system under a new Active
Directory installation. What I would like to be able to do is to have
several printer shares on two or more different systems pointing to the
same physical printer but having only one "generic" printer visible under
AD.

For example, have the printer shares \\pserver1\hp4000 and
\\pserver2\hp4000 appear as a single "hp4000" entry under AD. That way, if
one of the "print server" systems is taken offline for maintenance, the
other one takes over and the users are none the wiser.

Can this be done and if so, how?

Thanks in advance
Ken
 
If you have licenses for either Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000 Advanced
Server, you can use NLB (Network Load Balancing) to provide redundant print
services.

Of course, you'll be lacking and shared storage, but speaking personally, if
the worst thing that happened when a print server failed was that users had
to reprint any documents they had in the queue, I would be happy.

I plan to implement this soon, using Print Migrator 3.0 (PrintMig) to script
the print server settings from server to server to ensure consistency.

The following document claims that NLB is in common use with print services.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/WindowsServ/2003/standard/p
roddocs/en-us/planning_determining_applications_to_use_with_NLB.asp

The documentation for NLB on Windows Server 2003 is at:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/WindowsServ/2003/standard/p
roddocs/en-us/microsoft_WLBS.asp

Hope this helps

Oli
 
Just to clarify, NLB ships in the Standard Edition of Windows Server 2003,
which is nice.

Oli
 
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