Article Written 5-23-2005

Citrix Farm Management of Print Driver Replication

Auto Replicate or Manually replicate.

Introduction: A powerful feature of Presentation Server is that it allows Printer Driver Replication to all Servers in the Farm.

When should you turn on Auto-Printer Replication?

Auto-Replication can affect Farm Performance slightly, at least in larger Farms with several hundred printer drivers and over one hundred servers.

To better optomize Citrix Farm performance, and as a best practice, we have found that manually replicating printer drivers works best for our 100 server Farm. We have assigned one server in the Farm as the master print driver server, where we install and test all printer drivers, before manually replicating them to all servers in the Farm.

This configuration makes sense for us, mostly because we have configured the Farm setting "Automatically install native drivers for auto-created client and network printers".

This means native print drivers will be installed when a user logs in and if there is no printer mapping defined. Either way if both fail, the Universal Print driver is used.

Summary: In smaller Farms there are circumstances where auto-replication is very useful, and will not affect a Farms performance to a great extent. If you must set Farm printer auto-replication to on, then at least only auto-replication from one designated Citrix Server.


Written by Scott Chiara