Planning Your Physical Configuration

Understanding how many basic HPDPS components to install is important when you are designing your HPDPS environment.

If you need a minimum HPDPS configuration, you will have to install a client, a spooler, and a supervisor. If you need to increase the size of your HPDPS printing system, you will want to install additional clients, spoolers, and supervisors on the systems that will best support your printing needs. You will want to base the number of servers you install on the number and location of the printer devices you are supporting and on the number and size of the jobs those devices handle.

Determining How Many Clients to Install

Each host machine that executes HPDPS commands must have an HPDPS client installed.

Determining How Many Spoolers to Install

One spooler will typically support many hosts, especially in the DCE Extended Environment. However, you will need to consider adding more spoolers if any of the following situations occur:

The number and size of jobs being spooled exceeds the system capacity. Chapter 2 “Installing HP Distributed Print Service ” provides information to help you with this calculation.
The user groups you support are competing for printer devices and they each need dedicated system support. Setting up individual spoolers for the groups ensures that jobs for each group are handled independently.
The user groups you support have very different printing requirements. For example, one group prints informally and sporadically based on the needs of individuals, and another group maintains an intense production printing environment with consistent, predictable print requirements.

Because under the DCE Extended Environment you can monitor the entire print environment from your HP-UX system, managing multiple spoolers requires almost no more effort than managing a single spooler.

Determining How Many Supervisors to Install

A complex print environment will typically have multiple supervisors for every spooler that is installed.

Install supervisors in your network according to the following guidelines:

Install a supervisor on each host that has a direct-attached printer (such as a printer attached to a serial or parallel interface) that will be part of the HPDPS environment.
Install a supervisor on at least one host to support non-direct-connect printers, such as a network printer, or a remote lp or lpr spooler. Any supervisor on any host might be chosen to support a particular network-attached printer.

The size and number of jobs being processed determines the number of network printers that the supervisor can support.

Each time you add a printer to your print environment, identify either an existing supervisor that will support the printer device or create a new supervisor according to the guidelines given above.

Migrating Your Printers to Be Managed by HPDPS

An important consideration as you plan your physical configuration is deciding which printer devices you actually want to use with HPDPS. You might have some personal printers, for example, attached to non-HP-UX systems that are being used effectively today and you see little advantage in managing them with HPDPS. For most of your installed printers, however, whether attached to HP-UX systems or directly to the network, you may find immediate advantages in migrating them to the control of HPDPS.

Planning Your Physical Configuration

Technical documentation

» Table of Contents

» Index

Determining How Many Clients to Install

Determining How Many Spoolers to Install

Determining How Many Supervisors to Install

Migrating Your Printers to Be Managed by HPDPS