Number of printers on a single cluster

[Bill Bradley]

We're currently using Novell NetWare 4.11 to host 240 printers on a server
(PPro200 no less), but, have to get rid of NetWare, so, am looking at a
Windows 2003 Print Server Cluster.

Is it reasonable to expect I can support 240 printers on this cluster (most
are B&W Lasers, with about 15 color Lasers, and a few inkjets, almost all
are HP with JetDirect cards)--I always heard that Windows cannot support as
many printers as NetWare? Clustered servers would be Dell PE 2600 with Xeon
2.4 GHz and 4 GB RAM working off of a SAN. Number of clients is around
1600.

TIA!

 

[Laura]

Hi Bill,

My organization went through the same type of migration
not long ago. We also paid for microsoft consulting to
review our network desgin...as far as printing went, they
would never give us a clear cut answer about how many
printers a server could or should serve.

We started off with a single Compaq Proliant DL380 G2
with dual processors (xeon 2.2GHz), and 2GB of RAM. We
also built 2 additional servers with the idea that we
would start installing printers on the second server when
the 1st server started to become over-tasked. The second
and third servers were NEVER used.

At this very moment, there are 1069 active printers on
that single server, and CPU utilization averages about
50% during peak work hours. The cluster I'm building now
is a Compaq packaged cluster with DL380G3 servers...(dual
2.8GHz xeon procs., 4GB RAM), I maintain 2 mirrored
drives in each server for storage of OS files and print
drivers. The storage array contains the 2-disk mirrored
quorum, and the RAID1+0 logical drive for the shared
spooler.

So, I'd say that your server could adequately handle the
240 queues. The biggest performance improvement you'll
get will be from RAM (4GB is great), and from the spooler
configuration (I'd suggest RAID1+0 - fastest read/writes
overall w/redundancy) and make sure that the spooler is
on its own logical drive, and that no files are stored on
that drive.

Hope this helps!
-Laura

 

[Paul Baker]

May I ask why you decided you must get rid of Netware?

BTW, I don't think it's true that Windows cannot support as many printers as
Netware. Your source for that information should either provide documentary
evidence or be disregarded.

Paul