MSCS printer shares may not come online if quorum log is too small

After a failover of a cluster group that contains a Print Spooler resource occurs, all the printers on the virtual server may not be shared. For example, if you have 200 printers that are defined on the cluster, only 150 of them may appear under the virtual server after a failover. Other symptoms may include having printers that are defined in the Printers folder but that have no port selected.

This behavior can occur if the quorum log is not large enough to store the information for all the printers in the cluster registry. Increasing the log size from its original size of 64 kilobytes (KB) to 4,096 KB resolves this issue. For more information about how to increase the size of the quorum log, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

When you set up a print cluster, you must set the cluster registry to a size that is large enough to handle the number of printers that will be installed. To increase the cluster registry size, you must increase the maximum size of the quorum log.

Note The maximum size of the quorum log is determined by the value that appears in the Reset quorum log at box. To view the Reset quorum log at value, start the Cluster Administrator tool, right-click the cluster name, click Properties, and then click the Quorum tab.

To determine whether you must increase the maximum size of the quorum log, examine the size of the Clusdb file. Each node has a local copy of this file in the %SystemRoot%\Cluster folder. If this file size is larger than the value that appears in the Reset quorum log at box, you must increase the maximum size of the quorum log. For example, if you have printers installed, and the size of the Clusdb file is 3 megabytes (MB), we recommend that you increase the Reset quorum log at value to 8,192 KB (8 MB).

Note The default maximum size of the quorum log is 4,096 KB (4 MB) in Microsoft Windows Server 2003. In Microsoft Windows 2000 and in Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0, the default maximum size of the quorum log is 64 KB.

A good rule is to double the current size of the Clusdb file to determine the Reset quorum log at value. For example, if the current size is already close to 8,192 KB, increase the maximum size of the quorum log to 16,384 KB (16MB). Make sure that you enter the value in kilobytes. For example, if you want to increase the size of the Reset quorum log at value to 90 MB to handle 2,000 printers, you must convert 90 MB to KB. Therefore, in this example, you would set the size of the Reset quorum log at value to 92,160 KB.

Note 1 MB is equal to 1,024 KB. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: