Having recently migrated an on-premise Citrix farm to Citrix Cloud integrated with WVD in Azure, one of the architectural design questions that arose was how would printing from the office LAN work in the new environment. As the old on-premise Citrix farm was on the same IP subnet as the print server on the office network – printer mapping within the Citrix Hosted Desktops was easy to configure.
But now we had a new Citrix Hosted desktop hosted in its own VNET in Azure with no network connectivity back to the on-premise network in the office. Users connected to the new Hosted Desktop over the internet via the Citrix Gateway Service configured in Citrix Cloud.
As the office network printers were all still mapped to the end user client devices in the office, the easiest way to map the network printers in the office was to enable Client Printer redirection in the Citrix policies on the new farm.
As such, when users log into the new Citrix Hosted Desktop (i.e. Windows 10 Multi-session O/S in Azure), the local printers already installed on their client device are mapped inside their Citrix session. We use the Citrix UPD (Universal Printer Driver) if the specific printer driver for specific printers was not already installed on the desktop O/S. All worked well until we noticed that our Linux based thin clients (IGEL devices) were not redirecting the client printers within the Citrix session.
Having not come across this issue before it took a little digging to find the answer. As knowledge base article CTX140208 states it is a known issue that ‘Client printers on Mac and Linux clients fail to be created in XenApp and XenDesktop sessions running on Windows 10, Server 2012 R2 when configured to use the Citrix Universal Printer Driver (UPD)’
The solution: Install the “HP Color LaserJet 2800 Series PS” driver on the Windows image manually.
Previously this HP driver was pre-installed in Windows 7 and Windows server 2008 R2, but no longer appears in Windows 10 or Windows Server 2012 operating system and up. Once installed – client printer redirection for Linux thin clients works exactly as expected.
It took me a surprisingly long time to locate the correct HP driver on the web, so here’s download link should you require it.