You don’t really need a print server in your situation, given the small number of printers you’ve described. You’ve justified it yourself. Nobody is forcing you to use one 🙂 But in general, people use print servers to streamline client deployment, offer central management and to ease print driver maintenance. It’s all about scale.
I’m afraid there is no “Off”-switch for WSD specifically for Printer discovery in Windows Server As an alternative to disabling the “Function Discovery Provider Host” service, you could change the following outbound rules’ Action to Deny, in the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security: This will specifically block WSD and WSDAPI discovery events If your print … Read more
In general, print servers are used to both distribute drivers to client computer and centrally process and manage the print jobs. In large environments it’s useful to have homogeneous drivers (which will usually contain certain printing configurations that are desirable to control centrally) in addition to having a central location for managing and logging print … Read more