Posted by Jordan Pusey
A customer who was interested in PrinterLogic once asked us if our enterprise print management solution had been duly tested in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments. Of course, we told him. In fact, PrinterLogic’s on-premise software solution can integrate seamlessly with your existing environment, allowing you to solve longstanding VDI printing problems and truly perfect your VDI printing. “Perfect my VDI printing?” he joked. “I’d be happy just to get VDI printing to work like it should half the time!”
He went on to recount a number of VDI printing problems, such as VDI printing being slow, and his frustration with common VDI printing solutions that seemed to increase the complexity of print management without actually remedying the situation. It’s a tale of woe we’ve heard countless times from customers who love the benefits of VDI environments but can’t quite dial in their VDI printing.
Our enterprise print management software is great for conventional print environments, naturally, but it was designed from the very beginning to be powerful and flexible enough for deployment across the entire range of VDI environments, including Citrix and VMware, where dependable printing has typically been elusive. VDI printing problems such as:
- improper printer or driver installation
- unreliable deployments (especially automated)
- difficult rights management
- prolonged logon times due to session installs
- heavy WAN usage causing slow VDI printing
are not unique to any one environment, unfortunately, and they often call for multiple VDI printing solutions or a single solution that that fails to deliver on all but a few counts. PrinterLogic’s next-generation approach to print management addresses VDI printing problems at their root, providing you with centralized administration, improved driver management, ultra-reliable deployments that don’t depend on group policy objects (GPOs) or scripts, and drastically reduced print-related WAN traffic.
In both Citrix and VMware environments, PrinterLogic enables you to take advantage of location-based printing (also known as proximity printing). This means that you can dynamically deploy specific printers and drivers to your end users according to parameters such as Active Directory (AD) user, group, organizational unit (OU), IP address range, or even MAC addresses. Unlike lesser VDI printing solutions, PrinterLogic’s dynamic and automated deployments are easy to set up, easy to manage, and can be counted on to get the right printer to the right end users every time. And because PrinterLogic doesn’t rely on complex GPOs or scripts, you can choose to provision printers after a user initiates a session to speed up login times.
If your end users once found VDI printing slow, that will change with PrinterLogic. By establishing direct IP connections between endpoint devices, our unique VDI printing solution makes it possible for their print jobs to avoid the time-consuming and potentially interrupted back-and-forth trip to the central server. Furthermore, PrinterLogic’s self-service portal enables end users to identify and install nearby printers on their own with a single click. In practical terms, that means if an end user hasn’t already been added to an automated deployment pool, he or she can easily install a printer without having to call the service desk.
Suffice it to say that VDI printing problems don’t necessarily come with the virtual territory, as many organizations assume. You can perfect your VDI printing, and you don’t need to invest in a whole plethora of VDI printing solutions to do it. PrinterLogic’s enterprise print management solution is the only one you’ll need to bring rock-solid, easily managed printing to any VDI environment.