how is ThinPrint supposed to work with VMware View 4 and thin clients?

[soichiro]

I've searched and read a lot of posts on ThinPrint but haven't found specifically what I'm looking for... basically how does one install a printer using the ThinPrint drivers when using VMware View 4 and thin clients? We're testing the Wyse V10LE (RDP; using both its parallel and USB ports) and Wyse P20 (PCoIP; using its USB ports and USB port with USB to parallel converter) with USB and parallel printers. There's very little about ThinPrint in the View Manager documentation, but everything I've read says seems to indicate that its essentially Plug and Play: the printers should automatically install with the ThinPrint drivers. However, I only get the option to install the printers with their normal drivers via USB or LPT port. I see no option for ThinPrint. What gives? Is it because neither of these thin clients is on the ThinPrint Supported Thin Client list?

Thanks

[BlairR]

Hi There,

It doesn't work that way. The ThinPrint Output Gateway driver on each virtual desktop must connect to a Windows printer (either a local printer or a print queue) at the client end, so the job can be rendered by the appropriate print driver. A thin client (at least a non-Windows one) does not have any Windows print job rendering capability and can't be used in that way.

Windows embedded thin clients can theoretically be used with ThinPrint, but the appropriate print driver must be installed on them along with the full View client. That's not generally done, as you don't want to have to manage printer drivers on thin client devices, and they generally don't have enough processing power and storage space to act as a Windows print spooler.

Three options are commonly used -

1) Co-locate a Windows print server with the Thin Client devices, install the print drivers and queues on it, plus the "Thinprint Client Gateway Service". Modify your printer connection logic (e.g. logon script) on the virtual desktops to run TPAutoconnect -a {print server name} and it will connect the user to all of the printers on that print server. (check my TPAutoconnect command line syntax, I'm writing it from memory!). That way you won't have to install print drivers on your virtual desktops, only on the print server(s), and bandwidth will be kept to a minimum.

2) Implement a print server near the virtual desktops (e.g. in the datacentre) with the "ThinPrint .Print Engine" installed. The TPOG driver on each virtual desktop will be able to print to the ThinPrint queues on this print server without needing manufacturer's print drivers installed on the virtual desktops. If your print devices are at a remote location however, expect to use lots of printing bandwidth unless you implement a device like an SEH TPG60 or TPG120 which can be used for decompression on ThinPrint jobs. Many printers these days have ThinPrint decompressors built into the firmware too, which is the same as what an SEH TPG60/120 does.

3) Install print drivers on your virtual desktops and point them at the actual queues or printers, same way you would with physical desktops.

Hope this helps...

Blair.

[soichiro]

Thank you very much for the reply, but I still don't quite understand the implementation. Do options 1 and 2 have the printers connected to LAN drops instead of the thin clients? If that's the case we'd go with straight network print queues and forget ThinPrint altogether. We're looking for a way to connect many different kinds of printers directly to thin clients without having to install all the different drivers onto the master image - and also find a way to not have them get deleted on refresh or recompose. So far it does not seem VMware View works will in a (non XP embedded) thin client/non standardized l....

[BlairR]

You're quite right - I made the assumption that the printers are LAN-connected. If they are connected directly to the thin client devices, then you will not be able to print directly from the VM, using the ThinPrint driver (ThinPrint Output Gateway or TPOG). At some point, the job has to be rendered by a Windows print driver somewhere.

So, to keep your setup 'driver-free' (for the VMs at least), you'd need to implement a print server with a ThinPrint .Print Server engine on board. That would accept the jobs from the VMs (printing with the TPOG) and render them into their proper format (using the manufacturers print driver). It will then be able to send this fully-rendered job to the printer attached to the Thin Client device, if your device has a ThinPrint client on board as most of them do. But that doesn't sound like something you're keen on doing, which is fair enough. But it is the only way to be able to continue to use driver-free printing on the VMs. It also has the advantage of using ThinPrint compression, which is pretty good if you're printing across a WAN link (50% job size reduction on average).

Or.... install drivers on your VMs and print directly to network printers. Citrix Provisioning Server has a way of injecting print drivers into a VM gold image during boot, which is really handy for that kind of thing.

BR