re: Windows Printing and Network Load Balancing

Mark Bradley — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:27:05 GMT

I found your NLB printing information interesting but everyone seems to forget to mention that we are still dealing with the traditional Microsoft process "spoolsv.exe" and it is not capable of being managed by more than one OS/Server at a time. That is why Active/Active is off-limits.

I invite you to review my document on NLB printing that I have published on my site ( http://smbradley.com/documents/NLB_Printing_SBradley.doc ). I have successfuly deployed this in a REAL environment with ~ 1 million jobs per month. It "IS" supported by Microsoft cluster and print teams but you better be willing to support it yourself first. Why deal with NLB over traditional clustering? Simple...Transition time to recover from a server or service outage (7 seconds), I can use STD OS and it will span data centers. Replication was a challange but I scripted the process using PrintMig. We have ~ 2500 print queues on a HP DL385 with 4GB of ram and Win2k3 SP2.

Best wishes

Mark Bradley