print server failover

[signalpirate]

hey guys

right now we have one print server for the 300 users in our building. the scary thing i found out is there is no failover. I brought up the idea with management when we upgrade our server to have one as a backup.

sure that is al fine but if we are to have server1 as the print server and server2 as a backup... you run into the problem that all printers would need to be remapped.

we don't want to have down time in the even the print server crashes so how can we accomplish this? ( have both servers on and have one as a backup without running into the remapping issue.

second part to this would be this:

right now we have serverold running printer services. i am setting up a 2008 box from scratch ( no print config migration or anything because i need to standardize drivers printer names etc.)

when this new server is up and running, is there a way to automate the remapping of the printers for the users? going to 300 machines and manually remapping would be a pain in the you know what.

[sc302 Veteran]

quick solution would be to vmware it. not so quick and would require testing would be to create an dns alias for that printserver pointing to another server and have that server respond to that. Having it respond to the old print server name would give you a seamless solution, albeit not a instant fail over (neither is the vmware solution). Printing, although important, isn't a high priority issue they can be down for a fifteen minutes to a half hour while you make the proper dns changes (you better have those printer shares setup prior to failure they may have to reboot or flush their dns cache for this to take effect immediatly).

[bobbba]

If you mapped all your printers by logon script it would be easy to accomodate. Just change the parameters and get users to logoff and back on again. I have a self written Kix script that goes one further and does a search and replace on print queues at logon.

You can also use Microsoft's printmig to backup and restore printer config's.

an expensive and probably overkill solution would be to have a Microsoft Failover Cluster with the print queues held on a cluster resource.

[Baigley]

What kind of servers are server 1 and server 2?

I would suggest the following if at all possible.

Have Server 2008 R2 install on both server1 and server2. Make S1 and S2 a cluster and put the print server application on it. Server 08 R2 supports live Migration for failover. The drive mappings will be pointed to one location on your cluster, so if one of the servers goes out, it fails over to the other and you are still good. If you need to take down S1 for for updates, you can live migrate over to S2.

-Steve

[signalpirate]

bobbba

thanks for the info. we have about 300 users and quite a few printers ( probably too many). so i'm not sure if a script would work. we currently have each user mapped to two printers in case one fails. the thing is, having all printers mapped to each user, would be a pain for our help desk. they wouldn't know what printer to print to haha

scuba

does live migration work on host systems or does it have to be hyper v? for whatever reason i have management that doesn't want to touch "virtual" anything with a ten foot pole. *rolls eyes*

both server 1 and 2 will run 2008 standard x64. both will have dhcp. 1 will have dhcp for site 1 and 2 while server 2 will have dhcp for site 2 and 3. (2 will be in case of a backup).

1 will have wins on it and 2 will have printers and sccm.

i guess in a cluster format we could have everything together.

[Baigley]

  On 23/04/2010 at 16:58, signalpirate said:

scuba

does live migration work on host systems or does it have to be hyper v? for whatever reason i have management that doesn't want to touch "virtual" anything with a ten foot pole. *rolls eyes*

both server 1 and 2 will run 2008 standard x64. both will have dhcp. 1 will have dhcp for site 1 and 2 while server 2 will have dhcp for site 2 and 3. (2 will be in case of a backup).

1 will have wins on it and 2 will have printers and sccm.

i guess in a cluster format we could have everything together.

Live migration only works on virtual servers, its a great new feature of Server R2. Virtual servers are fantastic, especially for the fact of being able to move it around if your physical box dies. I understand that cost is a large feature of supporting this, but so is losing all of those printers. Doing it this way with live Migration, your users wont notice if it dies, where as without having this option they will have to log out and log back in after your backup is all switched over.

I support a large domain with 1000+ desktops and laptops, 90 servers with something like 50 virtual servers. I am a large fan of virtual servers if the application can support it. As we speak I am actually building our new print cluster.. I am installing all the new drivers and the printers, and will very shortly changing all the mappings to the new cluster. Our old cluster was all one print server, my new one is a different "node" for each different company. (Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc) The reason for doing this on our large domain is with all the drivers they would sometimes cause issues with each other and the print spooler would crash randomly. The different companies drivers didnt play nice.

-Steve

[signalpirate]

  On 23/04/2010 at 18:05, scuba said:

Live migration only works on virtual servers, its a great new feature of Server R2. Virtual servers are fantastic, especially for the fact of being able to move it around if your physical box dies. I understand that cost is a large feature of supporting this, but so is losing all of those printers. Doing it this way with live Migration, your users wont notice if it dies, where as without having this option they will have to log out and log back in after your backup is all switched over.

I support a large domain with 1000+ desktops and laptops, 90 servers with something like 50 virtual servers. I am a large fan of virtual servers if the application can support it. As we speak I am actually building our new print cluster.. I am installing all the new drivers and the printers, and will very shortly changing all the mappings to the new cluster. Our old cluster was all one print server, my new one is a different "node" for each different company. (Dell, HP, Toshiba, etc) The reason for doing this on our large domain is with all the drivers they would sometimes cause issues with each other and the print spooler would crash randomly. The different companies drivers didnt play nice.

-Steve

hey steve.. thanks for the info. after talking with my boss, we figured we could do something else instead.

OS on a raid 1 and d drive on a raid 5. i can use windows server backup to backup drive c to d. in case anything were to ever die i just take the drives and put them in another box. its not the greatest solution but until we get the go ahead to use virtual servers.. i'm screwed.

you mentioned you going to be remapping all the users.

our users have multiple versions of drivers on their computers... its a mess. what i'm doing on the new servers is getting the newest drivers from hp. ( we only have hp printers) Ideally what i would like to do is remap the printers obviously.. but also start off with a clean slate and get rid of the old drivers. Do you think this is necessary ... is there an easy way to do this without going to each computer and doing this manually?

thanks

[sc302 Veteran]

logon script it, the pc's just need to connect to the server.

as the server changes the driver, it changes on the pc (at least on my networks it does) not immediatly but within a half hour.

if you really wanted to you could have the logon script delete the printers and re add them, this would surely get the new driver pushed. You would have to script the default printer setting too.

[Baigley]

Just as sc302 said, you can do a logon script. If you have an actual print server, all the drivers are installed on the server and when the computer connects to the server it looks at the server to see if there is a driver for the associated printer and will install. As far as mapping goes, making a script for removing all the printers and adding the new ones is the best way. I dont know if you have Active Directory or not but it is made very easy with this.

You said that you were going to have backups done, is this to the same computer, just on another partition? Or another drive?

If this is the case, please make backups outside of this server once a month or something that you set and keep to it. You will regret it if something dies.

-Steve

[signalpirate]

thanks for all the info guys. this really helps. :)

steve... i'm going to user windows server backup to backup "c" to another drive. Commvault will take care of backing up that drive as a precaution. I've used the bare metal restore to test it out. the idea of bring a server back up in 10 min, just blows my mind haha

thanks again

[Baigley]

  On 26/04/2010 at 14:28, signalpirate said:

thanks for all the info guys. this really helps. :)

steve... i'm going to user windows server backup to backup "c" to another drive. Commvault will take care of backing up that drive as a precaution. I've used the bare metal restore to test it out. the idea of bring a server back up in 10 min, just blows my mind haha

thanks again

Of course man, glad I could assist in any way.

Take Care!