Desktop Networked Printer Management on Active Directory Environment
Right now all of our network printers are funneled thru a single Windows server. The printers are then deployed to the desktops via Group Policy.
However, should this server fail then the networked printers all go "poof" and no one can print. Obviously, some sort of AD-based replication would be fantastic -- having a "warm standby" is OK but there's no easy way to re-direct the print jobs: unless we add BOTH printers to the clients, but then that's annoying "Which printer should I use, 'Main Printer on Server1' or 'Main Printer on Server2'?". For that reason I'd like to avoid end-user workarounds and hopefully handle it somewhere upstream.
Thoughts?
I've been thinking about this, and contemplating the following:
- Set up a dedicated VM for print serving only
- Clone this VM and suspend (do not shut down)
- Copy the clone to a backup VM server
This covers me in the event of VM OS failure as well as hardware failure on the VM server (since we don't yet have anything more sophisticated to deal with failover). Recovery will take less than 15 seconds as the suspended VM is brought online, and could likely be scripted in the event that I finally get Nagios or something similar put in place...
"Warm" standby, without the client-side duplication. I can't think of any big snags, but this gives me a chance to throw the theory out there and see if anyone can find em.
Clustered print-server.
Total and utter overkill, but this is best-practices solution to your question!