We can't manage printers with WMI in a clustered environment

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Hi all,

 

Some time ago a customer of mine wanted to develop PowerShell scripts to manage printers in their clustered environment. They wanted to use WMI for that. The problem they found is that while they could list the printers on a stand-alone server by executing "get-wmi-object -class Win32_printer", they didn't get any result on a clustered print server.

After some research I found out that what they wanted to do on the cluster cannot be done with WMI. WMI is not cluster aware, so WMI classes like Win32_Printer won’t return anything specific for clusters.

Note there is nothing to fix on WMI. The cluster needs to expose itself via management layer which is missing at this point of time on Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 and older OS.

 

I hope this helps.

Regards,

 

Alex (Alejandro Campos Magencio)