Printer Redundancy

[Optimus]

Currently all my printers are shared from one server.. if it fails.. I am stuffed!

I would like to have a little redundancy on the network,

My question is simple... how do you do... it?!

Thanks,

Optimus

[actech]

I am in the process of getting around this too. What I am doing is setting all of the network printers up on two servers. As well as that I am rewriting the logon script to map the printers using the script in the Edugeek Wiki. The advantage with this is that if one server goes, in the script you can very quickly change which server the printers are mapped from. Hopefully will give a bit of redundancy

[imiddleton25]

we haver clustered 2 servers to act as printserver for our 21 laser printers and 5 photocopiers and its the best thing we ever did never had a problem.

[mac_shinobi]

we haver clustered 2 servers to act as printserver for our 21 laser printers and 5 photocopiers and its the best thing we ever did never had a problem.

Using DNS to make it think that 2 or more servers are one server so you have the printers duplicated between them so if one fails the other one acts as a backup ?

If not then how or what did you do to achieve this ?

[PiqueABoo]

I don't do it, but once upon a time I would have said cluster. These days I'd be tempted to make a Print Server a VM that can be fired up somewhere else if necessary... automatically if you can run to a shiny HV failover cluster, or the ESX/other equivalent.

[dhicks]

These days I'd be tempted to make a Print Server a VM that can be fired up somewhere else if necessary... automatically if you can run to a shiny HV failover cluster

Yep, that's what we do. Annoyingly, you still have to pay for two whole Windows Server licenses even though only one VM is running at a time, although that's still not bad at educational prices.

--
David Hicks

[Optimus]

Yep, that's what we do. Annoyingly, you still have to pay for two whole Windows Server licenses even though only one VM is running at a time, although that's still not bad at educational prices.

--
David Hicks

Would love to go down the VM route.. but a little pricey?!

[jcollings]

Would love to go down the VM route.. but a little pricey?!

I have to say that we started doing a bit of VM stuff a while back and I was suprised how cheaply you can get it up and running. VM capable servers are pretty cheap these days and ESXi is free!

[ssiruuk2]

All I have for redundancy is the fact our print server is currently a VM running in the freebie version of Vmware Server. I have another recent copy of the vm hard disk files so if things do go pear shaped I can boot the spare copy from another server.

[Ignatius]

VM capable servers are pretty cheap these days and ESXi is free!

Sorry to jump in ... I'd like to get something up and running in a lab situation for my education. I'd like to be able to run maybe 4 or 5 OSs simultaneously (1 - 2 NOS, 1 - 2 Windows XP Pro and 1 Linux). I plan to use ESXi. What VM capable servers would you recommend? I have seen articles about building the hardware from scratch but the cost is around £1400. I'm happy to build and test the hardware but it would be easier (and maybe cheaper) to get something pre-built. I just need some recommendations.

[ssiruuk2]

If its just for a lab, go buy a HP ML110 or ML115 tower for £200 (maybe less), load it with RAM (around £25 per gig) and boot ESXi from the onboard USB socket via a memory stick as the sata controller is not supported by vmware.

Cheap as chips virtualisation..done!