Knowledge Base

Yes. PaperCut will work fine and is fully supported on VMs such as VMware, EX Server, Microsoft Virtual Server, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, Xen, KVM, Parallels, and QEMU. We do have many large customers now running PaperCut in virtualized environments (on Windows, Mac and Linux). We're finding that more users, both big and small are moving across to virtual machines to host their print queues and print control software.

General Advise:

• Take care not to skimp on RAM. Allocate a server class amount of RAM to your VM. 2.0 GB or higher will be enough on most large networks. We find that sites have a tendency to run their VM's light on RAM. Linux systems generally handle this well but Microsoft Server guests will suffer with poor performance with low RAM. If the VM is dedicated to running PaperCut, see the KB article Increasing the memory available to PaperCut.
• Keep an eye on system performance over the first few weeks of operation. We've seen sites deploy PaperCut on overloaded VM Hosts and the guests are starved of resources. This would usually be observed by seeing slow printing performance and/or a sluggish "feel" when using the web administration interface.
• Take care with backups. Although a snapshot or copy of a whole VM disk image is a backup option, scheduling a direct PaperCut data file or database backup is still strongly recommended. i.e. one small corruption in a part of a disk image may render the whole filesystem useless. Having a backup of just the files you need will reduce the changes of such a mishap occurring.

Comments on individual technologies:

QEMU: As a general rule we do not encourage the use of QEMU in a Linux server environment as the performance is a little slow. Instead consider KVM. KVM builds on QEMU and leverages hardware vitalization. XEN is another popular alternative.

Side note: PaperCut uses KVM internally and Virtual Box for platform testing.

Keywords: artificial, virtual machine, virtualisation, hypervisor, HyperV

Comments

Share your findings and experience with other PaperCut users. Feel free to add comments and suggestions about this Knowledge Base article. Please don't use this for support requests.