Papercut MF Print Client Issues on Microsoft Hyper-V

I've had recently finished a project involving Papercut MF and I have to say from my experience with the software for what the organization wanted it worked much better then it's competitors.  Both Staff and clients are relatively happy with the product and the process.  

As I am working though documenting the process for setup, user accounts, etc; I came across a odd issue with Papercut.  After setting up and configuring a Papercut server on linux, I setup a new Windows 10 vm on Hyper-V to show how the client can be run and installed the print client would not work... at all.  I can run the installer and it installs no problem, but when you go to run the program it launches then quits; and when you do the same thing on a non-vm system it works just fine.  You could argue it's not an issue with papercut, but it is a VM issue which I would agree with if doing the disk2vhd or other cloning/imaging methods did not work which is how I originally tested to see if the system and process were viable for the organization.

I've been able to replicate this issue 100% of the time with a new install of windows on a Hyper-V client with a Linux Papercut Server; the work around is to get an image, or do a p2v conversion of a system to get the papercut client to work on Hyper-V.  As you can see below.

Papercut client not working on fresh VM install.

Papercut is not running

Papercut is installed but not running as shown in the taskbar

After grabbing a disk2vhd image of another station with papercut installed, the client remained working running in a VM environment

The task bar shows the papercut print client is running

Papercut is installed and running

Taskmanager shows papercut is running

It is an odd issue one that I hope Papercut fixes in the very near future but for now I'll go with using a p2v image for doing my testing and documentation of papercut.

******UPDATE******

Because I am documenting the process for setting up a papercut server I also setup a windows version and noticed several differences between the Linux Client and the Windows client particularly with the number of DLL files included in the Windows vs Linux client directory as showcased below.

At any rate taking the windows client files provided by the windows version of the papercut server fixed my Hyper-V client issue without having to use a disk2vhd copy.  All that are required are the missing dll files, once you add those missing files to the linux server provided client for windows; the client does work properly on a clean Hyper-V VM.

How to visualize a physical system for Hyper-V

Physical to Virtual (P2V)

There are many different ways to visualize systems.  I did a video on how to use Disk2VHD if you want to see it visit my youtube channel.  This post is going to cover how to use Sysinternals disk2vhd application.  Disk2vhd is a utility that creates a virtual hard disk (VHD/VHDX) for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V. The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows' Volume Snapshot (VSS) capability to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion.

Disk2VHD GUI

Disk2VHD is a very small application and can just be run from a directory it does not need to be installed.  You can see from the GUI above the options are very simple to select, and since Disk2 VHD uses windows VSS capabilities you can save the VHD/VHDX to the drive your cloning but it is not recommended.  I recommend you always save to a drive that you are not visualizing.

Disk2VHD Progress

You can continue to use the System as your visualizing it just keep in mind it may not catch all your changes as the VHD/VHDX is created.  Here is a great post about when to use VHD/VHDX https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/ausoemteam/2015/04/24/deciding-on-when-to-use-vhdx-or-vhd-files-with-hyper-v/ If your using server 2008R2 or older you will have to use vhd

When the process is complete you should see a .vhd/vhdx file in your file system that you can now use to attach to a Hyper-V virtual machine.

Finished Conversion