Re: NLB Printing

"danno" <dan.roth@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1120154123.908751.160230@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> NLB will give me failover capabilities without the extra software and
> hardware costs.
> I can use Printmig.exe from the Resource Kit to replicate the
> drivers/queues/shares.

I still am not sure about the need. Does your print environment have
capacity problems? Do you have problems with your print server failing and
you have vital docs that can't be printed elsewhere?

Here is what I look at when evaluating the print environment of an
organization.
1. How stable is the existing environment?
If there are stability problems wtih the servers, then I carefully look at
what might be causing failures and look at keeping them up and running. File
and print servers can be run at high 9's without any problems because the
services are pretty bullet proof to begin with.

2. How busy is the existing environment?
If your current print servers are hitting capacity limits, then creating
others and spreading out the printers will make sense. Perhaps scaling up
servers will help as well. I have seen 10,000 users on one print server
without any problems.

3. How critical is it that a print job absolutely has to print right at that
moment in time?
This is where I might look at server clustering, but even then the failover
time will make the environment unavailable for a moment or two. If printing
is highly critical, I would consider making sure I purchasing top-end server
equipment with fault tolerant hardware (i.e. RAID, teamed NICs, hot
swappable drives to fix RAID issues, fault tolerant power supplies, fault
tolerant cooling fans, fault tolerant memory configurations, and so on) and
keeping the server properly patched. I might also consider using imaging to
store an image in case a printer server needs to be completely rebuilt.
Another thing I would consider is setting up critical printers so that there
are queues on more than one print server and redirecting critical jobs in
the event of a print server failure.

I understand your looking into NLB for printing, but the only reason that I
see for using NLB for printing would be if you are having capacity issues
and you need to scale out because scaling up won't meet your business
requirements. If HA is your goal, then server clustering is the right way to
go for a variety of reasons. NLB will not help you if the print spooler
service fails, for example, so it is not a good solution for HA for
printing.

I hope this helps you. Good luck.


.

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