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Windows Printing and Network Load Balancing

Time: 08:58 EST/13:58 GMT | News Source: Microsoft | Posted By: Kenneth van Surksum

Hello, my name is Yong Rhee and I�m a Support Escalation Engineer on the Windows Server Core-Performance team. Every now and then, we work with a customer whose administrator is trying to deploy a printing solution on Windows Server 2003 (or Windows Server 2008) and they want to spread the load using Network Load Balancing. They are trying to achieve this by using either a software solution such as Microsoft NLB, or a hardware solution such as BigIP. Alternatively, they may try spreading the load using Round robin DNS (A records). Of course, when problems arise, their first call is to us ... and that's when they get the bad news: Using Network Load Balancing and DNS Round-robin to create a redundant printing solution is not supported.

There is an exception to this - if you have only one active node and you maintain a hot spare machine, you would need to swap the IP addresses (you must use static addresses) between the machines to redirect the traffic. In addition you would also need to ensure that your printing configurations are identical on both machines. This would include the registry information for the print environment as well as the actual printer drivers installed on the machine. Using a solution such as the PrintBRM.EXE command line tool can facilitate this synchronization. Even in a scenario with only one active node in the load-balanced environment, should you call in for support, one of the first things that you may be asked to do is to disable the load balancing before we troubleshoot the printing issue.