High Availability for Universal Print connector

Hi AndreasAsander I am planning to move one of our client from Print Server to Universal Print and they have multiple sites. It seems like I have to have separate windows server running for each site with a connector and connected to the network with VPN. We are in a phase of moving the client from domained joined to Azure.

Hi steveburkettnz, Thanks for letting me know. I 'll have a look at bandwidth pricing. 

Zenulbashar : Just a caution about running your connector in an Azure VM. Raw print server to printer traffic can be quite sizeable so you might get hit with an unexpectedly large egress network traffic bill from Azure if your company does a lot of printing. Just something to consider!

Zenulbashar and AndreasAsander 

We're tracking the feature request for connector HA here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/universal-print-feature-requests/connectors-working-together-to-provide-high-availability/idc-p/3858137

I'm marking this feature request as a duplicate. Please up-vote the other request.

Hello,

Check out https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/universal-print/fundamentals/universal-print-connector-how-many-printers so that you know how which size of the VM you need to host your connector server.

The Connector Server is basically just another Windows Printserver so it has to be on the same network as the printers.
If you have printers in completely separate networks then you would have to have a connector server in each network.
The other option is again, UP Ready printers which does not need the connector at all and connect directly to Azure.

Check with your printer vendor if there are any firmware updates for your printer that makes them UP Ready, the more of us asking the vendors hopefully will put more pressure on them to release firmwares supporting UP nativly 🙂

All the best,
Andreas

Hi AndreasAsander Thank you for providing additional information and clarification regarding the high availability options for the Universal Print connector. We are totally on Azure and don't have any server but planning to create a B2s VM to run the connector. In this case I believe we have to have 2 VMs, second one just for bcakup connector.

Does the VM should be in our network in order to access the printer, if it doesn't then what's the option to connect to our printer?

Unfortunately, None of our printers are UP ready so that's not an option for us. I believe maybe in future we will get a firmware update on our HP LaserJet CP5225dn printer

Thanks again

Each connector is unique and there is no official high availability option yet, meaning if the connector goes down there is no backup connector that can take over.

It sounds like you are running the connector on your own workstation though? If that is the case that indeed does not sound optimal even though possible. You should have a Windows Server running your connector.

If one server with the connector should go down you could power up a new one and perform a backup/restore:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/universal-print/fundamentals/universal-print-connector-backup-restore 

If you have newer printers they hopefully have UP Ready support.

In case all of your printer are UP Ready you don't need the connector at all and then won't have to worry about server HA.