Hello everyone.
I am having some issues with my VDI environment and mapping the printers for the users. I have approximately 40 remote offices of which almost all of them have 1 -3 employees at them. Each site has 1 -2 printers. For the most part they have slow internet connections, but they do have hardware VPN between their sites and our datacenter. Combine this with the need to back up their data, we setup a VDI environment using Microsoft Terminal Services. The thorn in everyone's side with this has been printers. Currently, I have a print server in our DC (same location as the VDI environment) and I share the printers from there. I then have a GPO called VDIPrintingBase.bat. Basically, that grabs the username and calls another batch file %username%.bat. That batch file then has two commands :
printui.exe /in /q /n"\\PrintServer\Printer"
printui.exe /y /n"\\PrintServer\Printer"
If you don't already have the printer installed the computer, then it works without an issue. It maps the printer and sets it as the default. However, if you already have the printer, it will spit out seemingly random error messages. Sometimes it will tell me that the script is unable to find the printer, which seems like it is just a dummy error from MS. If there were connectivity errors for either of the servers, I would have bigger issues.
As you can see, the above solution is a pain as there needs to be one script per login. At the time though, it was a quick fix and worked. Now the environment is growing and we plan on doing more with it and this solution has become less feasible. For a while, I was allowing pass through printers but the slow internet connection seemed to be the issue as the VDI was starting the job...sending it to the local workstation...then back up to be forwarded to the print server only to come back to the local office.
The thing I was hoping to get from this post is to find out how others handle this. I would like to figure out a way to map the printers without error; unless there is a real error. I was curious to find out if others had run into a similar issue or have some better ideas. The reason I posted this with RemoteApp in the subject is because I am having a similar issue with that environment and will be using the solution to work on both.
I thank you in advance for looking and offering any assistance.