WAAS, Terminal Server, and printing

[dkennedy99]

Running 4.0.17 of WAAS with clients on the edge side running terminal server clients back to terminal servers on the core side. TCP optimization is occurring fine with port 3389 for TS sessions.

However, my question is about printing. I have TS clients and their network printers on the same subnet on the edge side with the terminal servers on the core side with the applications. It is on the terminal server session side where they are printing back to edge-side printers. I have tried both "socket" and "IPP" type of connections back to the edge-side print queues, but no printing output seems to be optimized. Only when using "IPP" on the print queues do I see connections to the printers as "Internal Clients".

How do I go about optimizing printing in this setup? We do have clients still printing locally in the offices so at least that part is working.

Regards,

David

[dkennedy99]

Unfortunately this did not speed up the printing either. Just as slow

Classifies it as an internal client:

10.96.208.155:31920 10.104.160.225:445 Internal Client

[dstolt · Accepted solution]

David,

What you are probably seeing is the CIFS protocol being extremely chatty across the WAN. Without being able to offload the round trips across the WAN, your server has to wait for each acknowledgement, and each round trip, even compressed, is limited by the latency.

I can offer 2 possible solutions in the upcoming WAAS 4.1 code:

1. Centralized Printing Optimization: Move the print queue to a DataCenter server and WAAS will optimize the traffic in both directions for both Local print jobs and DC to Edge Print jobs (you could even try that now).

2. New CIFS Application Optimizer+Virtual Windows Blade: New WAAS code will support bidirectional CIFS optimization (no more core/edge) and Windows Server Core 2008 to run local infrastructure services like Print. The print server will be more supportable and the new CIFS optimizer will optimize in both directions. This however requires new Hardware (WAE-674)...

Dan

[pmccubbin]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for all your contributions (I rate them a "5") to this forum and for keeping us all up to date on the Cisco Roadmap for WAAS.

Best,

Paul

[dkennedy99]

Thanks for all your help, Dan.

I figured I would end up having to centralize the queues and I'm okay with this. The tests I've run with this prove that optimization/compression is great with regards to AppSocket printing.

I'm not sure we'll be able to get new WAE hardware soon, but it may be possible.

Again, thanks for all your help!

DK