Redundancy for printers

[Maximus]

Hi,

 

Is there anyway of sharing the same printer on two servers so if one server goes down users can still print without having to add another printer?

 

Regards

Ivan

[plexer]

DNS Round Robin - File or Printer Shares - Cluster Help

 

Ben

[Sirbendy]

We do..currently running the "main" print server, but also have a supplemental server doing other tasks that has the same printers installed using the microsoft migration utility.

 

We just put a batch file on the staff share that deletes any existing mappings and remaps to the secondary server, and if there are any issues we just say "run that", and off they go without interruption.

 

We don't do printers by GPO though, we use con2prt..

 

We're in the middle of creating a virtual print server, and we'll be migrating people over to that gradually (or possibly en masse over the summer).

[Michael]

It should be possible. Create the same TCP/IP port on another server, install the drivers, but I'd recommend you give it a different share name so you can tell the two apart.

 

To be honest though I have never done this in practice, because if a server went down, chances are other services would too. Although printers are important, they're not top of the list.

[Sirbendy]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/printmigrator3.1.mspx

 

does it all for you.

 

Telling them apart is easy..ours are usually \\taw900z002\taw900p0xx

 

If they're on the secondary server, it becomes \\taw900z003\taw900p0xx

 

We use the "z" designation for auxilliary servers, "p" for printers, "v" for virtual machines, and so on and so on. Printing is managed on it's own box, so if it goes down, or if any others go off, we can still keep rolling. As I say, we're virtualising the box, which will make the whole thing fairly bombproof.

Edited June 5, 2008 by Sirbendy

[soapyfish]

I have been considering some printer redundancy we are currently running an RM CC3 network. The school site is spread over several building 5 in total with a selction of colour and mono printers in each building.

 

I decided to set each server to host a selection of the total printers so that there will always be printing avaliable in each building even if one of the print server fails.

 

This method ( I beleive ) will enable me to to use the RM printer credit service to allocate credits and monitor usage as if I was using 1 printer server. The down side is that I do not have actual redundancy of all printers but all users will be able to print somewhere on the school site.

[kmount]

When our print server decided it didn't want to print anymore I copied them all over onto a new server and ran them both in tandem comparing speeds, reliability etc before finally deleting them from the original.