High Availability for Print Servers

[christian0924]

So we do not use Hyper-V and we use VMware/v-Sphere 6.7. If I were to create a High Availability cluster for our print servers, is it the same set up as what VMware has provided? Is there extra steps? I know sooner than later we will be upgrading to Windows 2019 but that will take some time. I am having a hard time looking online...

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

You need to deepen what you want to accomplish. However, I see no problems implementing the solution with v-Sphere 6.7

ARomeo

[christian0924]

So our intent is to form our 3 physical Print Servers into a HA Cluster. What I want to know are the same step by steps that are all online to create a High Availability Cluster on v-Sphere the same steps that can be used for Print Servers? It doesn't cater to Print Servers too much and those that exist utilizing hyper-V. Which we do not use.

[Scott Vessey]

vSphere HA can failover any VM running any OS and any application or service.

If the ESXi host on which one of your print server VMs fails, that VM will go offline until HA powers the VM back onto one of your remaining ESXi hosts.

[christian0924]

Thank you so much to all that have answered.. I feel relieved.

[TimSheppard]

Not sure I exactly follow you when you say “is it the same set up as what VMware has provided?" but vSphere HA provides ‘high availability’ by restarting any VMs there were running on a host that has failed as long as the VMs are on shared storage and that you have spare compute capacity available on the remaining hosts. Think of it as a hard power off then a power on. Will your OS and application handle that ok?

vSphere Fault Tolerance provides higher levels of availability but essentially ‘mirrors‘ the VM so that it is running in sync on 2 hosts therefore if anything happens to the host where the primary VM is running then connectivity is transparently and immediately switched over to the secondary VM running on a different host. This is fine if you have a server hardware issue but if your issue is down to a fault with OS or application then FT won’t help you. For the application high availability, you really need to have that function built into the application itself.

Essentially ask yourself, what faults am I trying to protect myself against?

[christian0924]

We have experienced some very bad outages.. recent one was after 4th of July. In case our main hub goes down, the other 2 physical Print servers throughout our area are able to keep processing print jobs for users that is our intent. I know my wording is bad.. I am trying to word this the best way possible without having it sound too confusing. 

[harry89]

• The option will be to use shared vmdk among the vms by using SCSI bus sharing on the controller
• By using SCSI bus sharing mode as physical you can keeps vms on different host ..that will give you high availability .
• Quorum has to be achieved by Guest OS (WSFC) in this case .
• This can also be achieved by multi writer locking which is handled by vmfs data and doesn't need SCSI bus sharing

Reference : VMware Knowledge Base

Cheers!

[Scott Vessey]

Moderator: Please do no create duplicate threads on the same topic.

The new thread you created today has been locked and archived.

Please post to this thread with any remaining information or questions on the topic.

[christian0924]

We have SecurePrint feature on all of our RICOHs. With the last few outages we have had we are being tasked to create HA Printing with all of our print servers. So far all necessary information and how to's have been identified to include all hardware and software requirements. With HA being implemented, is it possible to also use our SecurePrint feature too? If possible, is there any additional steps and information we need on our end?

[Scott Vessey]

As per my previous reply in this thread, vSphere HA can failover a VM running any type of OS/application/service - it is a great solution where the service in question does not have it’s own high availability or clustering mechanism.

So if you are running SecurePrint in a VM on your vSphere HA cluster, that VM will be restarted should the ESXi host on which it was running go offline.

Not sure what else to add...

[christian0924]

Scott, I really appreciate the fast response and the help. I do apologize for the lack of detail and content with the question I had, again thanks for understanding the jist of it.