Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of Baikie
Baikie

asked on

Can i virtualize a print server?

Hi there,

Ok, just a quick one. Is it possible to virtualise a print server? And if so are there any issues that i need to be aware of?

Thanks,

Iain
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Amit Bhatnagar
Amit Bhatnagar
Flag of India image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Hi

You can virtualize any type of server

The only problems that you can have, if that you can add a serial printer to the server. But even that can be add with a small configuration

Jail
If all your printers are connected via the network adapter/cat5e, then you are sweet as.
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
MS Seminar..hmmmm..you are probably a Gold Partner.

And Yes, you are right. This is one of the recommendations from MS for Virtualization. Although, it would also depend on the config. of your current Physical Server, the amount of memory being used for each Guest Server, also whether the machines are using Dynamically expanding HDD or a static one.What kind of HDD are you using, SCSI, RAID, SATA etc?

All of these things matter.
Avatar of 1bigboomstick
1bigboomstick

No Gold Partner here!

My host has 8GB RAM total; 2 for the each virtual server and 2 left over for the host itself.
Each Virtual server is on it's own SATA 160GB, set to a static hdd of 120GB in the virtual environment.



Deano  
Cool !! Config. looks pretty neat. Have you ever tried running a perfmon or similar to see what's spiking..What kind of freeze does it get into..Soft or Hard?
Never tried a perfmon of any sort actually.  When it freezes, if I go look at the task manager, spoolsv.exe is running at 99% and jobs are sitting in the ques waiting to be printed.  The top job has fully spooled, it just doesn't print.  While this is happening, it appears as though print jobs to other printers will go through.  I just restart the Print Spooler service, the 'problem' print job spools up again, but this time it prints off without any hesitation.  It has happened from multiple different users and workstations, multiple different files and file types, files of all sizes...it's a real brain squeezer!  The only thing I can think now is that maybe there is a very quick bump in the network and maybe this particular printer / driver won't recconect on its own.
I would suggest starting from the System \Application Log under EventViewer. Then, I would suggest getting the latest version of Spooler.exe from Microsoft. What about Anti-Virus...Try disabling Real Time monitoring to see if that helps. Upadte the NIC Drivers as well in case you have not...(which I doubt).
Also, try this...http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953546

It is the latest version of the DLLs. I am assuming you are using 2003 and not 2008.
Check the version of DLLs that you have in your System..Compare them with the article.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953155