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We have two physical servers being used as a clustered print server. The physical servers are EOL and we want to migrate the print services to a single VM. Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to do this? This would be from Windows 2008 R2 to Windows 2012.

I have suggested just migrating the printers using the Print Management tool, unpublishing the printers, renaming the clustered server, renaming the new VM to that original name and joining to the domain, importing the printers, and then publishing the printers again to AD.

My manager is concerned of the ability to roll back. Many of the printers have been on the print server for longer than anyone can remember so we might not know of any special drivers, ports, etc.

Looking for other's experience with something similar, holes in my proposed plans, any input is welcomed.

Thanks!

Cesar Diaz
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I did similar by moving printers one at a time. Removing it from the directory on the old server and adding it to the new, leaving the printer on the old server for a little while. Then eventually removed it from the old servers and the users were told ahead of time that if they had issues with printing, to simply re-add their printers. Worked super smoothly.

As a note, you may not get to experience this issue, but my print server VM was causing a lots of slow. We created a second virtual drive and moved the spooler directory onto it. That solved a lot of problems.

Note: my move was from Windows 2003 to 2008R2 and later just between two 2008R2 machines.

ETL
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  • What was the user experience as far as the printers they already had added? Did they have to be re-added or did they just work? – Cesar Diaz Feb 24 '15 at 19:47
  • @CesarDiaz Until I totally removed the printers from the old server, there was definitely no problem, even if the printer wasn't listed in the directory anymore. The users were all warned that they needed to re-add their printers and after a few days we removed the printers from the old print servers. Had very minimal calls - my users are familiar with adding printers. That is with about 100 users that were affected by the switch. Add only a very small number of calls. – ETL Feb 24 '15 at 20:13
  • Now, I would like to see a better solution but I don't know what better solution would exist for that. One that would be totally transparent to the user. – ETL Feb 24 '15 at 20:14