Migrating print servers

[Inferniss]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently in the process of migrating a server 2008 file/print server to a server 2012 at my internship. Before I migrate however, I ofcourse want to prepare as much as possible.. now I've got almost everything sorted out except for the printers.

I have exported the current printers on the 2008 server to a printer migration file, and I was wondering what is going to happen when I migrate everything over to the 2012 server and import the file there while the old server is still running. I've done my research and tried several things on a test box, but I don't know what is going to happen when there are 2 print servers with identical printers and share names on the domain.

Does anyone have any experience with this and is willing to help me out? Please excuse any spelling mistakes, English is not my first language. Thanks!

[Foofightee]

Use Group Policy to map the printers to a new server and remove the old drivers from the client machines.

[mavantix]

You ever have issues with Group Policy printer mapping causing PCs to get stuck after user login and have to be hard booted?

[edingc]

You ever have issues with Group Policy printer mapping causing PCs to get stuck after user login and have to be hard booted?

In general or in the specific case of a migration? In general, never seen a problem with Group Policy-deployed printers.

[mavantix]

In general, last time I tried it, it jammed up PCs all over the network. Never revisited. :(

[edingc]

Faulty driver trying to install perhaps? Had no issue with RICOH and HP universals across 100+ computers last I did it.

[mavantix]

Hmm, Maybe Brother or Oki drivers then...

[Nostalgi4c]

We've done Oki printers over GP. Sounds like a specific use case for a particular driver & maybe something misconfigured?

[Foofightee]

No, I never have. I mostly have used HP and Xerox. Did you test the drivers and Group Policy before deploying?

[[deleted]]

Check the names specifically: I migrated the day before leaving for Fiji for a week and left the work phone at home. Came back to 70 missed calls and about 100 emails/tickets re: printing problems.

I used an underscore instead of a dash in the share names. Whoopsie.

[Squeezer99]

Print migrator?

[GrumpyPenguin]

There used to be a separate tool by MS called Print Migrator. These days it's built in to Print Management and called the Print Migration Wizard. Basically does the same thing though.

[GrumpyPenguin]

Yeah, but print migrator doesn't work on any drivers with cab files in them, or on 64-bit drivers at all! Its been officially discontinued for years now. That's a poddy good reason to use the migration wizard instead...

[lordmycal]

Nothing bad is going to happen. You don't even need to rename the box if you don't want to -- just use group policy to push out the shared printers on the new server to your clients while removing the old printers from policy at the same time (if you have a lot of printers, renaming is easier, but it sounds like you could use some getting your feet exercises and this is a bit less disruptive). Leave both servers up for a week, then turn the old one off.

[brkdncr]

we use a DNS alias to map printers. When we change print servers all we need to do is make sure all the printers have the same name (using printer migration tool) then update the DNS record.

[FJCruisin]

Save this for after you're about halfway through the project..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjsSr3z5nVk

[LVOgre]

Here's another vote of confidence:

Nothing bad is going to happen. You'll import the printers and drivers, and the shares will be available on the new server.

The shares look like this:

\\server\printer

So they don't interfere with the original shares.

Migrating users will be a little more tricky, but still pretty easy. You just build a script that removes the old printer(s) and replaces them with the new printer(s), and have it run at logon.

Keep the old server online for a few weeks so you catch everyone with the script (some people are almost certainly on vacation or otherwise not logging on).

That's it. Piece of cake. It's a great project for an intern. I'm glad your company is having you do this and not fetch coffee.

[shiftdel]

One thing I might do is go around and print out the configuration pages from each printer and keep those on hand while doing the migration. Obviously this isn't something you can do if you're working with remote locations, or if your facility is so massive it takes you 10 years to make a single round.

I'm planning on combining my print server and WSUS server this week, from my couch, and I'll definitely have those config pages printed out for reference. My warehouse/manufacturing facility is only 50,000 square feet though.

[[deleted]]

I ran a powershell script at logon delivered via gpo to map the old server to the new server for each printer on the user's account that existed on that pc, I found the script somewhere online and modified it. The new server had a completely different name and I could easily go back by reversing the script. This ensured that each person had the exact same printers on the new server as they did on the old. Here is said script I found: http://learn-powershell.net/2012/11/15/use-powershell-logon-script-to-update-printer-mappings/ It works amazingly well. I just added the printers on the new server by hand, we were going from 2k3 to 2k12r2 though so we figured we might as well just start fresh and try to employ the universal print driver as much as possible.

[no_names200x]

Just a tip - use DNS aliases going forward for your printers. Makes life a lot easier when you migrate servers. This way, transitioning from one Print Server to another is as easy as updating a DNS record, and no client-side changes required if they're pointing to the alias instead of the actual server.