[THIN] Fail-over farm / printing

We have been running an MFXP farm for quite some time now. This was a simple
environment in a hub-spoke network setup. 

Now we are looking to set up a secondary site, yet in an active/active
model. 
By this I mean that some applications will run on a MFXP-farm in one site,
and other applications
will run in the other site, and fail-over to each other. These sites are
connected with a WAN-link.
TS profiles & TS homedirs would be stored on DFS replicated between these
sites.

Now I am facing a challenge regarding printing.

* Dedicated printserver? 
---------------------------------
In the HKCR-registry you have references to the (default) printers in format
\\SERVER\PRINTER <\\SERVER\PRINTER> .
But what with apps running in the other site, do you send the jobs to the
dedicated print server in the other site
(seems very unefficient in regards to bandwidth usage); or do you install
another dedicated printserver? 
If the last option, how do you handle the hostname-part in the
\\SERVER\PRINTER <\\SERVER\PRINTER>  in these user profiles,
so users don't have to change default printer all the time?

Are there also 3rd-party printing solutions (ThinPrint, UniPrint,...) that
"virtualize" printers so that in the users' registry,
it does not reference these printserver's hostname, while in fact using a
different (read: local) server in the background
to process & send the print job from?

Who can share some experience in a similar environment?

> Kind regards,
>  
> Frederic Allaert
> 
>

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