Clustering Printers---HELP

[dietcokebottle]

Hi All

I need a high uptime solution(99 percent if possible) for printing the only solution I can see is clustering. I have about 600 print queues on 3 NT 4 servers at the moment but my company is moving to 2000 server and at the moment the uptime for the 3 file and print servers is low because the spooler crashes it crashes the rpc service which stops filesharing and sometimes we need to reboot. We propose to seperate file and print but we need a high uptime solution can anyone suggest anything and what do people think of clustering printing ?

 

[jtb]

you can run multiple print queues from multiple servers to the same or pool of printers... but 600 servers on 3 or 4 servers? That's alot... what do these servers look like? are they multi-CPU? how much RAM? etc?

I don't think clustering NT servers will help your problem... It's possible your servers are just overloaded... maybe just adding memory will be enough to fix it... maybe you need to move to a 100 print queues per server model if you plan on keeping NT4... Moving to a newer OS (from NT to W2K or W2K3) may also allow more robust solution and faster recovery...

Good luck!!

JTB
Solutions Architect
MCSE-NT4, MCP+I, MCP-W2K, CCNA, CCDA,
CTE, MCIWD, i-Net+, Network+
(MCSA, MCSE-W2K, MCIWA, SCSA, SCNA in progress)