Terminal Services RDS and Print Services

Question

Planning our Server 2012 server architecture.
We have five showrooms and a dist center all connecting to a data center with rds virtual machines.

The data center has a GB wan connection, and vpn's exist between the data center and all remote offices and dist centers.

When considering print services, I can see two options:
Option 1. Having a print servers at each location

Option 2. Install the printers on a virtual print server in the data center, which has all the company printers installed

Benefits of Option 1 is print jobs are offloaded quickly to the remote showroom etc print server to render on that offices printers.

Benefits of Option 2 is a centralized single printer installation/sharing, and better control who has access to the printer resources. This also
eliminates the additional server in each showroom and dist center.

Option 2 seems better

Hoping for some recommendations.
Bret

Answer 1

Hi,
Besides of the Central administration, you shall also consider followings when deploy multi server with multi-sites:

1.Stable WAN/VPN to support successful print jobs when connecting to print servers
2.The number of printers in each office/site
3.Frequency of each sites will use the printers and printer servers
4.The Capacity of the printer sever.

Reference links:
Print Server Scalability and Capacity Planning
This describe the contributing factors that will impact performance of printer servers like hardware specifications, network latency, and the content of the print job.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-r2-and-2012/dn554243(v=ws.11)

Multi-server and multi-site deployments
In the bottom of this article, it compared the benefits and considerations for each printer server deployment plan.
https://www.papercut.com/support/resources/manuals/ng-mf/common/topics/multi-site-and-wan.html

Please note: Information posted in the given link is hosted by a third party. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy and effectiveness of information.

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Hope this helps and please help to accept as Answer if the response is useful.

Thanks,
Jenny

Answer 2

Appreciate the comments.

Item 1 is important for inbound remote connections as well as outbound print.

I believe the best way is for me to start with a VM Print Server and see how it goes.

I can always add the remote Print Servers to the domain, but it would be great to have the least amount of hardware
possible involved in the solution.