Printers in Profile Manager

Question

Printers in Profile Manager

Hello All,

I am in the midst of moving roughly 400 Macs to authenticate against Active Directory and also to be managed in Profile Manager. In addition to this, we are migrating our printing services away from Novell iPrint and onto Microsoft Server/AD. We have roughly 100 printers. I know I can install these printers into OS X server and have them installed via a profile per device/device group, but I'm wondering... are there any limitations to this setup that I should be aware of? Is there any limit I should consider when adding this many printers to my server? My server specs are:

2013 Mac Pro

3 Ghz 8-Core Xeon E5

64 GB RAM

512 GB SSD

I think I have plenty of system resources to handle all of this, but I'm wondering if anyone else is using Profile Manager for this many devices/printers and if there are any gotchas. Thanks!

Posted on Nov 16, 2015 1:40 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 17, 2015 3:10 AM in response to MyrkridianRhapsody

Apple's own software no longer supports sharing printer queues to Windows clients. Either you could add the printers to a PC server for the benefit of any PC clients or as more organisations do use the PC as the print server for both Mac and PCs. If you do the later you should make sure you set the queues up to use PostScript and not PCL.

I would not consider this quantity to represent problem in terms of performance or capacity more that a list that long is going to be more fiddly to deal with.

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Answer 2

Nov 17, 2015 11:52 AM in response to John Lockwood

Thanks for the reply John. I think maybe I wasn't clear. The printer queues will be hosted on the Windows server. What I want to do is install the printers on to my OS X server (as a secondary server to the Windows print server), and then serve up those printers through profiles to the Mac users. This means I have to install about 100 printers locally on the server, but then I can just push whatever printers I want to whatever users need them via groups. Make sense?

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Answer 3

cdhw

Level 4

3,594 points

Nov 17, 2015 4:33 PM in response to MyrkridianRhapsody

In theory, it should work fine. I use device profiles to make sure that clients only talk to the printer(s) in the same room. In practice, you are going to have to try it and let us know how you get on.

Good luck.

C.

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