Managing Universal Printing Settings

To configure RAS Universal Printing, select the Universal Printing category in the RAS Console.

By default, the Universal Printing driver is automatically installed together with an RD Session Host Agent, VDI Guest VM Agent, or a Remote PC Agent. Therefore, upon adding a server to the Farm, the Universal Printing is already enabled. The Universal Printing driver is available as a 32 bit and 64 bit version.

Enabling and Disabling Universal Printing Support

To enable or disable the Universal Printing support for a server, right-click the server in the Servers in Site list and click Enable or Disable in the context menu.

Configuring a Printer Renaming Pattern

By default, Parallels RAS renames printers using the following pattern: %PRINTERNAME% for %USERNAME% by Parallels. For example, let's say a user named Alice has a local printer named Printer1. When Alice launches a remote application or desktop, her printer is named Printer1 for Alice by Parallels.

To change the default printer renaming pattern, select the Universal printing category. On the Universal printing tab, specify a pattern in the Printer rename pattern field. To see the predefined variables that you can use, click the [...] button next to the input field. The variables are:

• %CLIENTNAME% — the name of the client computer.
• %PRINTERNAME% — the name of a printer on the client side.
• %SESSIONID% — RAS session ID.
• %USERNAME% — the name of the user connected to RAS.
• <2X Universal Printer> — This is a legacy mode where only one printer object will be created in the RDP session.

You can also use certain other characters in a printer renaming pattern. For example, you can define the following commonly used pattern: Client/%CLIENTNAME%#/%PRINTERNAME%. Using this pattern (and the user named Alice from the example above), a local printer will be named Client/Alice's Computer#/Printer1

You can specify a different printer renaming pattern for each server in the Servers in Site list.

Note: Redirected printers are only accessible by the administrator and the user who redirected the printer.

Printer retention

When client-defined printers are redirected to a remote session, it takes time and impacts overall session establishing time. To improve user experience, you can reuse previously created user's printers. To do so, on the Universal printing tab, set the Printer retention option to On.