Hey folks, I have 600 printers that I must network map which are located across 6 print spoolers within our organization. These printers need to be mapped to this single server allow an application to push print jobs. Unfortunately
I don't think Windows 2008 R2 was ever designed to have this many printers mapped via network simultaneously. Once it reaches about 350 - 500 printers I start to experience problems after I restart the spooler. Examples include, the spooler crashing or the
logs showing that printers are being deleted with no explanation, driver errors... etc. Originally the design never had the print management service, however I'm looking for other options and now that I have it installed, i noticed that I can add other print
servers.
We went ahead and tested to see if simply adding the server to the print management screen would work for us. I deleted all printers that I had mapped via network, restarted the machine, added the print servers and attempted
a test. The results I got back shows that the printer was added via network, job was pushed and then the printer was automatically deleted. It worked!
My question is, is this the intended design? Is it sustainable? When we upgrade to 2k12 servers, is this something I can consider.
Alternatively we are looking at the ability to just go head and install the printers locally as non-shared printers by migrating the 600 printers from the other print servers... basically creating one massive private print server that is exclusive to the applications use.
Also note that when i'm referring to logs above, i'm referring to Event Viewer PrintService Operational logs.