Printer Server

[faza]

Hi,

 

I am planning on installing a new printer server. Can anyone recommend a spec for me or a tool i could use?

 

Faza

[Edu-IT]

How many printers are you looking to serve?

[jamesreedersmith]

Whats your current network set up (RM/Vanilla/Windows if so which flavour)?

[faza]

We are looking at 22 printer queues and growing

[jamesreedersmith]

Whats the current primary server OS?

[faza]

Its a server 2003

[jamesreedersmith]

What spec, whats it currently doing and how many clients are you serving from it, what other servers do you also have?

[faza]

Current spec 3Ghz 1Gb

[jamesreedersmith]

Doing what for how many clients?

[faza]

Its a printer server for 22 queues and growing with abourt 100 clients

[jamesreedersmith]

Dual/quad core 2/2.2 with 4gb ram and server 2008 r2 would be a good start with plenty of capacity.

[faza]

We would like to stick to server 2003 if poss as all our other servers are 2003 and we going to run a server 2008 test bed in the near future.

[jamesreedersmith]

In which case server 2003 R2 so you can use GPO's to deploy the printers. (might be worth buying as a 2008 r2 License and using it backwards so you are ready licensed when you come to upgrade.

[Sylv3r]

I've not used it, but this should allow you to transfer your existing printer queues from the old printer server.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsServer2003/techinfo/overview/printmigrator3.1.mspx

 

I think personally I would recreate them all again manually as this would allow you to ensure you have the latest drivers etc installed - it all depends on how much time you have for the switch over I guess.

[teejay]

Don't need much for print queues unless you are running something like pcounter. For just the q's then we run 42 q's on a single virtual machine with 1 x 2.8Ghz cpu and 2Gb RAM, copes no problem.

[CyberNerd]

we have 50+ printers, 650 clients with papercut running on a virtual machine (single xeon 2.5Ghz) with 512Mb. Runs fine.