Can anyone shed any light onto our current printing position?
We're building up our HV7 Test environment with Win7 32bit Gold Image in the hope of going live later this year in Production.
When looking at our printing options we can't seem to find a suitable solution.
Our existing printing infrastructure consists of a single Windows print server that has 100 or so printers shared out via UNC path. We currently use Group Policy to install printers targetting users by the appropriate OU and security groups they're in. For some reason this process does not work within our VMs. I have tested placing the machines in the same OU as our physical machines and run a GPResult which shows the printer policies are supposedly being applied successfully - but no group policy printers to be found anywhere inside our virtual desktops and no trace of any GP issues in Event Viewer.
We're hoping to go live with some kind of a thin/zero client device that will NOT be running Windows IOT/embedded though this is currently dependent on Microsoft's upcoming development of a suitable Skype for Business plugin to offload VOIP audio to a non Windows based client. Therefore VMware's client printer redirection is not an option for us as this depends upon a Windows based client device.
The next option is to use Location Based Printing with the ThinPrint feature of Horizon. From my reading of the implementation guidance though it apears that VMware do not support UNC Path printers. All our printers are currently installed and shared out by UNC from our print server. We don't want to use direct printing to IP as we'd lose valuable central management of print drivers such as changing duplex settings and installed options etc centrally.
The next option we considered was manually installing printers into the virtual desktop for each user as we on board them into VDI. Our initial testing seemed to show that Persona Management was retaining connections to these manually added printers across our non persistent linked clones but we later found that this proved unreliable and some printers would persist and other didn't on a seemingly random basis.
We have UEM but haven't started to use it as yet. Does this give us any additonal options in terms of printer deployment? Are there any other ways of skinning this cat that we haven't considered?
Many many thanks in advance for anyone who's managed to make it this far! Apologies for the lengthy post.