Longhorn Server

Terminal Services Easy Print explained by Microsoft Terminal Services Team.

Charles Aunger / www.eviglio.com — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:02:25 GMT

It doesn’t seem more than 2 minutes ago I was sitting watching the announcement of Terminal Services Easy Print and excellent demo from Nelly Porter of Microsoft.

Well now you can hear it from the team themselves at the Terminal Services Blog.. WELL DONE GUYS..

Introducing Terminal Services Easy Print: Part 1

Historically, printing redirection has been difficult for Terminal Services(TS) customers. To successfully redirect a given user's client printer to the terminal server, the proper drivers needed to be installed on both the TS client machine and TS server machine. Customers have discovered that the requirement of having the TS server host a matching printer driver can be problematic for a number of reasons (e.g. inability to find matching drivers, or the drivers the printer vendor supplied just don't work with TS). Simply put, we wanted to solve these issues and reduce administrator headaches. The solution is TS Easy Print: a "driver-less" solution for printer redirection over a TS session.

What is TS Easy Print:

TS Easy Print is a proxy for every print action that simply redirects all printing-related work to the user's local machine without the need to install any print drivers on the TS server. This system provides several benefits, such as being able to redirect any printer from the user's client machine without having to reconfigure the server while still allowing the user to configure the print job as though he were printing on his client machine.

On Longhorn Server, the user's local client printers installed in a TS session will be installed with the TS Easy Print system.

What is needed to use TS Easy Print:

On the TS server, Longhorn Server needs to be installed. That is all! No additional drivers need to be installed; no additional configuration needs to take place. On the TS client, the user must be running TS client 6.1 and have .NET Framework 3.0 SP1 installed (both will be released in the same timeframe as Longhorn Server). Both TS client 6.1 and .NET Framework 3.0 SP1 are intended to be available for XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista machines. As a result, XP, Windows Server 2003, and Vista machines will be able to connect to Longhorn servers and use TS Easy Print just as Vista machines will.

How TS Easy Print works:

As mentioned above, the general idea behind the solution is to make a driver on the server that redirects all printing related work to the local machine. The implementation of this solution comes in two pieces.

The first piece is presenting the user with printing preferences through UI so that they may configure the print job on any printer they have. Instead of creating some server side UI that will show the bare minimum of preferences users need (such as number of copies, landscape v. portrait, etc...) and apply this UI to all printers, the TS Easy Print driver acts as a proxy and redirects all calls for UI to the actual driver on the client side. When the user edits preferences for a print job on a redirected printer, the TS client will launch this UI from the local machine on top of the remote session. As a result, the user sees the same detailed printer-specific UI and all printer options are available to him. He would see exactly the same options as if he were printing something locally. The user's selected preferences are then redirected to the server for use when printing. Below are screenshots that show an example of the above behaviour.

click to read at source

Charles Aunger
charles aunger eknowlogy / eviglio / frameworkx / charles.aunger homepage

Longhorn to introduce Terminal Services Session Broker (Load Balancing)

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 10:10:04 GMT

Another Microsoft announcement at BriForum 2007: Longhorn Terminal Services will introduce session-based load balancing.

TS Session Broker, a new feature in Windows Server “Longhorn” Beta 3, provides a simpler alternative than Microsoft Network Load Balancing for Terminal Services. While not limited to a specific number of servers, the feature provides significant value to farms of two to five servers. With TS Session Broker, new sessions are distributed to the least-loaded server within the farm—optimizing performance—and users can reconnect to an existing session without having to know specific information about the server where the session was established. IT managers can use the feature to map the Internet Protocol (IP) address of each terminal server to a single Domain Name System (DNS) entry. This configuration can also provide fault tolerance; if one of the farm servers is unavailable, the user will connect to the next least-loaded server in the farm.

This new load balancing mechanism is not built on NLB. Instead it is built on the TS Session Directory infrastructure.

The way it works in a bit more deail is that when an RDP client connects to a Terminal Server and that server is unable to service that client it queries the Terminal Services Session Broker on that user's behalf and then redirect that client to an alternate server. This redirection happens automatically and does not user interaction. This mechanism also supports server draining - the ability to prevent new sessions from being created on a Terminal Server so that it can be taken offline for maintenance.

So what is not provided? This mechanism is intended to simple scenarios and does not support:

Application Load Balancing
Complex/configurable balancing algorithms (built-in support only for session-based load balancing)

for more informaiton on Longhorn Server Features click here

Charles Aunger
charles aunger eknowlogy / eviglio / frameworkx / charles.aunger homepage

Terminal Services Easy Print Demo at Briforum 2007

Charles Aunger / www.eknowlogy.com — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 10:01:56 GMT

Way cool demo because at last Microsoft have taken it to heart that we would like printing fixed.

Nelly Porter of Microsoft gave an excellent presentation at Briforum 2007 in Chicago by showing of 2 new features of Longhorn Terminal Services

Plug and Play Device support. Connect a Camera to the client side and watch it connect to you Terminal server.

and then

Terminal Services Easy Print: TS Easy Print, a new feature in Windows Server “Longhorn” Beta 3 using XPS ( XML Paper Specification), enables users to reliably print from a TS RemoteApp program or full desktop session to a local or network printer installed on the client computer. Printers can now be supported without the need to install print drivers on the terminal server. When users want to print from a TS RemoteApp program or desktop session, they will see the full printer properties dialog box (printer user interface) from the local client and have access to all the printer functionality. IT administrators can use Group Policy to limit the number of printers redirected to just the default printer, thereby reducing overhead and improving scalability.

How does TS Easy Print work ? The way TS Easy Print works is that an XPS print driver running on the Terminal Server will spool the printer data down to the client over a Virtual Channel. On the client-side an Easy Print plugin intercepts this traffic and prints it out, even if the local printer does not have an XPS driver. Here are a few feature highlights:

The printer data is compressed on the wire and will be able to be controlled
Supports any printer settings including OEM
Full control over which printers are redirected
Printer preferences are preserved and honored in remote sessions, including default printer setting
Embedded XP, and Windows Clients will be suppor initially because .NET framework is required, CE will hopefully be available.

Nelly Porter also showed off the AERO / GLASS support now with in Longhorn Server, giving end users Vista look and feel..

for more information on Longhorn Server Features click here

Charles Aunger
charles aunger eknowlogy / eviglio / frameworkx / charles.aunger homepage