Need Advice on Windows Print Servers

[Demetri Orlando]

Out middle & upper school are on one campus and the lower school is in a different place connected to us over two dedicated T1 lines. We have one domain. All users log into the domain.

Currently all of our printing is done from user workstations to the printers' IP address. We don't have a print server. We have about 40 networked printers, 800 computers, 1,000 students, 150 teachers. One-to-one student tablets in the upper school. Our servers are Windows 2003 or 2008. Clients are all XP Pro.

Our current printing setup is working fine [except users can't discover/install printers themselves] but I don't have any way to monitor printing, and I'd like to implement something like PaperCut NG. This requires a print server, so I need some advice about how a print server would need to be configured...

1. How much RAM, disk space, processors, etc. would you configure, given our size?

2. Would it be dumb to run a print server as a virtual server? (we do have a few virtual servers running, and are considering a new bigger server to be another virtual server.)

3. Do you think print servers (vs. direct printing) are a good thing? Does the "single point of failure" matter?

4. If we had one print server on our main campus, would it work for our lower school site or is it dumb to be passing that traffic over our point-to-point T1 circuit? [thanks Keith]

[Keith Gillette]

Orlando,

Good luck with your setup. Here are my thoughts:

4. Do NOT pass print traffic over the T1. Print jobs with photos can be 100s of MB. You will saturate your point-to-point link. Set up a print server on each campus.

3. Yes, definitely a good thing for administrative control & monitoring. We use Print Manager Plus (similar to PaperCut) in conjunction with our Windows Server 2003 print queues. We have found print service to be highly reliable, so I would not be concerned about introducing a single point of failure.

2. We run all of our Microsoft Windows Server 2003 servers (except 1 Domain Controller) virtualized under VMWare ESX for server consolidation & disaster recovery purposes. You should not have a problem running a print server virtualized with appropriate underlying hardware.

1. Difficult to say without looking at actual print volume. I have not found print queues to be a resource intensive service, so any relatively current hardware you throw at it will probably suffice.

[Demetri Orlando]

Keith & others,
I appreciate the info. I don't yet have an accurate count of our print volume, though I am collecting that info. The page count on our 3 academic building printers (mostly just the upper school students) last year was about 100,000 copies. If you were doing this on a virtual server on a current VMware box, how much ram, processor, etc would you dedicate to the print server? (ballpark) 2 gigs, 4 gigs, 10 gigs? How much hard disk space would you guestimate? (100 Gigs?) I'm just trying to get a sense. I have no idea... thanks again.

[Keith Gillette]

Demetri,

The beautiful thing about VMWare is that you can change your mind with a reboot. I would start small on all counts if this virtual server will be dedicated solely to printing. Check the PaperCut NG system requirements for a starting guide, but off the top of my head, I would try each campus print servers with a single processor, 1 GB of RAM, & 20 GB of HD space. If there will be any other functions on the print server, set up a separate partition for the print queue files so that if there's a printing glitch that causes uncontrolled growth of a print spool file, it does not take down the system partition & hang up the entire server.

[Justin Dover]

Checkout pcounter also. I have been using it for years and it is a very cheap but wonderful product. I have years of print data. It can handle windows and novell printer servers. It does not require and extra server, you can just stick it on top of your existing printer server. It also does print quotas if you want so you can limit how many pages per month for people if you want.

[Frank]

We've used both Pcounter and a few programs we've written from scratch. RPM Remote Print Manager is the one we use the most for various print management, especially if coming of an AS400 for the school district's mainframe system. RPM allows you to hold queues, suspend queues, and our favorite use is to print to PDF everyone of the print jobs coming off the school printers, this way we have an easy back up and archive of everything printed. WE used to do this manually and have boxes of paper for backup. Now RPM will take the school print files, convert the print file to PDF and automatically archive them digitally for us. Plus, if needed, we use the feature allowing us to have the print files emailed to us if needed.

Pcounter is good for getting a grip on the number of jobs / print files printed.

Best of luck to you!

Frank