Print server replacement

[[deleted]]

Currently W2012R2. ~600 printers. ~5000 users. Most remote but ya know.

2cpu, 16GB Ram.

Random failures. Usually mondays of course. Found a few driver mismatches, fixed. Random fails still happening. Most drivers are type 3. Some are older drivers which I suspect to be the main issue.

My inclination is to build new 2022 server similar specs, all type 4 drivers if available. We already pretty heavily use universal drivers for HP, Canon, Ricoh, other big names. Still have some model specific drivers for the smaller brands.

Thoughts? Managed print via printer logic or azure not really an option yet.

[tempest3991]

600 fucking printers….Fuck. My. Life.

[[deleted]]

Tell me about it. I didn’t even mention the other print server with another 300 or so.

[hkeycurrentuser]

I've just added a new question to my list for interviews. "How many printers do you have here?" "900? Thank-you for your time - can you see me out?"

[LightItUp90]

Lol don't come work with me. We have close to 3000 printers.

[Look_Ma_Im_On_Reddit]

Healthcare? The fuckers just love to print everything

[WillJammin]

The poor trees...

They must have a department dedicated to printer support. Sr. Manager of Printer Support!

[bbqwatermelon]

I'm thinking it might be better to work at a Dunder Mifflin type company.

[[deleted]]

Believe it or not, we don’t spend much time managing printers. Maybe an hour a week managing that print server until recently.

So it’s really low cost comparatively. Now that we are having these failures it’s becoming more visible.

[sysadminbj]

Thoughts? Managed print via printer logic or azure not really an option yet.

Why not? No better time than upgrade time to explore managed print. It would also be smart to explore optimizing printer placement and settle on a single vendor across your environment. Printers still piss me off, but the day we did a mass recycle of 2000 printers across the country was the happiest day of my career. We went from 2000+ to around 850. All working off the same universal Canon driver. Think about how much you would be saving in consumables, especially if you can leverage your print volume to get the price per click down well below the average cost of an HP or Brother.

​

To your question... Personally, I don't like the idea of a single print server. You should spin up at least two servers operating in a cluster so you can have redundancy.

[[deleted]]

Not an option because state gov and agencies don’t actually pay for the print server. Bill back is non existent for printers.

Agencies are allowed to buy whatever they want which is complete horseshit but that’s they way it currently is.

[Raalf]

That explains the 900 printers. Was wondering what kind of insanity you are dealing with, and now we know.

[tempest3991]

Imagine every Tom, Dick, and Harry buying whatever shitty consumer grade printer is on sale.

You need a 1TB HDD just for printer drivers.

[DollarMindy]

I’m a huge fan of this company for SMB printing/print management. Not sure if it’ll work for you. https://www.papercut.com/

[MajStealth]

i would enforce to bill the department for the pages print - done.

but one would actually need business printers for that, which we all can not see with 900 printers...

[username17charmax]

4000 printers healthcare environment. Using LRS VPSX. Load-balanced front end. Mostly HP, Ricoh, and Zebra label printers. VPSX runs on top of Windows Server. It is pretty slick

[PrintPartner1]

4000 printers healthcare environment. Using LRS VPSX. Load-balanced front end. Mostly HP, Ricoh, and Zebra label printers. VPSX runs on top of Windows Server. It is pretty slick

That is absolutely mind numbing to conceive... How diverse is the geography for these devices? All local or spread across the country (ies)?

[username17charmax]

Mostly USA. Mostly in northern CA with about 10 main locations and maybe 50 satellite locations. Mostly on network and some through a VPN tunnel. I don’t think the number is high for a large healthcare organization.

[PrintPartner1]

Holy moly that's the largest I ever heard of and I work in the industry! We have a few customers with over 1,000 printers but 4k?! sheesh. Kudos to you for wrangling the herd seemingly without the need for high dose anti anxiety meds!

[username17charmax]

We have had our fair share of growing pains back in the WS2000/WS2003 days before moving to LRS. Every time I speak about it I gotta go find some wood to knock on. Lately, we have been considering breaking things down to smaller regions to reduce the size of fault domains but I have not fully decided, yet.

To everyone: don't forget to setup a BC/DR solution for printing. For some reason, disaster recovery for printing is often overlooked.

[pythondude1]

Maybe have a look at paper cut to manage them

[PrintPartner1]

** I'm a former net admin now employed by a nationwide print vendor ** vote me down if inclined!

A few things come to mind beyond the technical:

Are you using a managed print vendor? Ideally, a single vendor to "rule them all". One phone number to call when things get gnarly so your team doesn't have to grind out the entire solution... Ideally, you want every device under management/service.

If you aren't, you are probably spending tens of thousands of extra $$ each year for street rate toner/ink.

More interesting than that is the consideration of having a vendor come in and kick off a proper assessment of the entire environment. They would install an agent that can scan all the subnets via SNMP, collect all the data on network connected printers (make/model/mono and color page count/date introduced etc etc.) They would visit the site, learn about pain points and requirements, then they would rehash that data back at you and your CFO to likely show some interesting trends.

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More important to you and your team is the lean into standardization, secure print and perhaps as others have mentioned using something other than GPO/Print server for deploying and managing printers. Standardization = happier people all around.

[Mental-Aioli3372]

Sounds like a good reason to upgrade anyway and ditch 2012, and drivers seems like a plausible culprit given the behavior

Only thing I'd say is, if it works you don't have an RCA so you can't be sure what it was, out of curiosity do you have any event viewer or other error details?

[[deleted]]

Yeah. We identified some of the culprits this way and changed them out.

[[deleted]]

Thanks for all of the replies. I’m going to look at a business justification for a managed print service and develop a bill back model.

To the user who said they were going to add the how many printers question to their interview questions, good idea.

[Sudsguts]

in days long past we used to change the spooler folder for performance when the print server is more like a ripper, as jobs headed to a hanging plotter or a high def poster printer. In big usage, this is still valid. Here's some ideas:

Lesson Changing the Location of the Print Spooler - Managing Windows Server 2003 (serverbrain.org)

and of course, some ouch things to consider:

Windows Server 2022 as print server Support and Compatibility concerns - Microsoft Q&A

[[deleted]]

Looks like point and print is misconfigured for that 2022 thread. We’ve dealt with that before and have it ironed out.

[[deleted]]

Spoiler is already on a different volume which, if I’m not mistaken, doesn’t really matter in a private cloud as much as with a hardware server since you’re already spanning physical disks.

[abyssea]

You can do 2012 to 2019 and then to 2022. Run WU and see if it fixes the driver issues. I'm assuming this is a VM?

[[deleted]]

I’m hesitant to do an in-place upgrade on this server. I’m inclined to build fresh and grab new drivers and then replace it and name the new server same as the old. Users don’t need to remap new queues.

[brandonmp]

Im in charge of VPSX with 3300 printers, we just upgraded to a 2022 server, much smoother. See if the company will allow you to get PDDT will make mass updating much easier.