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NelsonCandela
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How to make use of network mapped printers without ThinPrint on RDSH servers?

Dear community,

I'm having trouble finding a good or even working way on how to make use of network mapped printers without the use of ThinPrint.

I need to provide printing services of network printers capable of functions such as punching, perforating and caseworking etc. and these functions are not supported by ThinPrint so I would like to bypass ThinPrint and use a specific driver per device.

The setup is as follows:

Remote office users use W7 x64 clients and have access to a locally available network mapped printer (for example a Konica-Minolta Bizhub C368).

The VMware Horizon Client is 4.5.0 build-5650915.

All clients connect to a RDSH farm that consists of two RDS Hosts of Windows Server 2012 R2.

I know that I need to install the network driver on the RDS Host, and also a separate Windows Server 2012 R2 based Printserver is available.

Simply "mapping" (\\printserver\printer01 ...) and thus automatically installing the driver seems not to work, ThinPrint is always used. So do I need to run a specific exe-based installer instead?

What do I need to do to bypass ThinPrint and use the driver that is installed on the RDSH farm instead?

Additional information:

VMware Horizon Agent: 7.5.1-9182637 x64

VMware Horizon 7 Administrator: 7.5.1 build-9122465

Thanks!

BR

NC

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NelsonCandela
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Dear mchadwick19,

first of all thanks for the answer.

I'm not really sure if that's the way it was supposed to be done solely. Citrix for example just passes on the printers available on the local client and makes those available on the network once the client established a connection to the remote server. Why the heck is this so complicated in Horizon?!

The answer, however, is to update Horizon to 7.8! (at least that's what did the trick for me)

The v7.8 documentation says:

The VMware VMware Integrated Printing feature enables users to print to any printer available on their Windows client computers.

Hence I have updated the Composer, updated the Connection Servers, updated the agent in the Golden Master RDS image (all to v7.8) and recomposed the images. When now a new client is used (v5.0) the printers known to the RDSH machine and available on the client computer (both local and network based) are being mapped automatically supporting all extended functions.

What a burden ...

BR

NC

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5 Replies
NelsonCandela
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Come on people, please.

There must be hundreds of admins & technicians out there who want to map locally available network printers into their Horizon session (and possibly bypass ThinPrint).

Until now I have disabled ThinPrint in the agent, re-deployed the two RDSH machines but now no network printer is mapped anymore by default.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

BR

NC

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mchadwick19
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You would need to map the printer per user in the RDS host with Group Policy or UEM. That way when a user logs in to the RDS hosted app the printer will be available in their profile on the RDS host. This may slow down your app launch times as well as increase utilization on your RDS hosts.

VDI Engineer VCP-DCV, VCP7-DTM, VCAP7-DTM Design
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NelsonCandela
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Dear mchadwick19,

first of all thanks for the answer.

I'm not really sure if that's the way it was supposed to be done solely. Citrix for example just passes on the printers available on the local client and makes those available on the network once the client established a connection to the remote server. Why the heck is this so complicated in Horizon?!

The answer, however, is to update Horizon to 7.8! (at least that's what did the trick for me)

The v7.8 documentation says:

The VMware VMware Integrated Printing feature enables users to print to any printer available on their Windows client computers.

Hence I have updated the Composer, updated the Connection Servers, updated the agent in the Golden Master RDS image (all to v7.8) and recomposed the images. When now a new client is used (v5.0) the printers known to the RDSH machine and available on the client computer (both local and network based) are being mapped automatically supporting all extended functions.

What a burden ...

BR

NC

lucasitteam
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Thanks Nelson, I was also searching for this answer.

All our clients are working remotely. They connect over the internet to our  infrastructure.  Daily, they login into their Virtual Desktop  (VDI) desktop. Desktop Operating system is windows 7. Mostly they print documents and access emails. We install printer drivers for them. They normally do not install printers on their desktop. We install drivers on  their Virtual desktop.  They share their printers over the USB.  Everything works fine on windows 7. But on windows 10 sometimes it works and  sometime it does not. Every windows 10 update is unwelcomed problem.

To avoid windows 10, we are migrating them to Remote desktop.  We tried and failed with printer redirection over USB. Printer redirection on  RDP/Horizon is unreliable.

I hope to make it work. we are still at 7.2 version.

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NelsonCandela
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Dear all,

I might also add that this worked out really well when using the latest Client (currently v5.2).

In my/our case one could connect to the remote session taking over the local printer information, but in case this was a multifunctional device or multifunctional driver (so for example one driver for three models) the correct driver was not necessarily selected. This only worked well when replacing the v4.x Client with the latest version.

BR

NC

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