Forum Discussion
vrivoire_97090
Nimbostratus
NimbostratusMS Print servers
Hi all,
I am planning to use my new F5 LTM to load balance Windows Server 2003 print servers. For the moment, it doesn't work for me: I can see the shared printer but I can't map it.
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Here's the new link to the guide for creating the WMI monitor. As I recall it was pretty straightforward. I'm even using the same interval and timeout. Looking at my monitor properties, the only thing I see that is different is my alias service port is 3389 and the external program path is /usr/bin/monitors. Also, you'll need to enable remote WMI requests on the win2k8 boxes if not already enabled.
Monitoring WMI Services from Big-IP
Christopher_Boo
Cirrostratus
CirrostratusBrian
I think some of the confusion is in the objective. Some just need to send a print job to a load balanced print server. Others need end users to be able to map to print queues, download drivers, print, etc. Also every environment is different. I'm sure that is a factor as well. I'd strongly suggest using the WMI monitor. The TCP port check just isn't sufficient, or at least wasn't for us. I posted a link to the how-to a few years ago, but it looks like the site update broke it. I'll try to find it again. Believe it or not, I still have my Win2K print server VIP (NPath) in production as well as the Win2K8 print Server VIP (standard). They are both rock solid. I will say if bandwidth might be an issue, I'd go with Npath. But we haven't had a print server outage in years with either vs. multi-hour outages using Windows Print Clustering previously.
Chris