Reporting Services Resilience recommendations

 

I found many people asking what the recommendations from Microsoft to make Reporting Services resilience are and if there is any plans for the future to make Reporting Services cluster aware.

 

As you can see from the following link, the installation of a complete report server installation in cluster is not supported:

 

Unsupported cluster configurations include deploying a complete report server installation (that is, a report server and its database) on each node of a multi-node cluster. Specifically, you cannot deploy Reporting Services on a two-node cluster that consists of an active node and a passive node that is used when the active node fails.

 

…

 

Although the Report Server Windows service and Web service cannot participate in a failover cluster, you can install Reporting Services on a computer that has a SQL Server failover cluster installed. The report server runs independently of the failover cluster. If you install a report server on a computer that is part of a SQL Server failover instance, you are not required to use the failover cluster for the report server database; you can use a different SQL Server instance to host the database.

 

 

Planning a Reporting Services Deployment

https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms157293.aspx

 

 

RECOMENDATION:

 

The recommendation would be to install Reporting Services in a different machine and store only the databases in the SQL Server Cluster.

 

If you wanted to recover the information from Reporting Services (the reports) in case of a failure in the machine, you could follow the steps from the following article. Under the Reporting Services 2005 heading (I guess that is the version you have)

 

How to move a Reporting Services database from a computer that is running Reporting Services to another computer

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/842425

 

 

In summary, the only thing you should backup in order to be able to restore the system, in case of a failure in the machine, is the backup of the 2 Reporting Services databases (ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB) and the encryption keys file. It is advisable to make a backup of the configuration files as well.

Note: If the en encryption keys were lost, the effect would be the lost of the information in the Data Sources. They would have to be reconfigured again by refilling the connection string information.

 

There is a new article on this:

Backup and Restore Operations for a Reporting Services Installation

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms155814(v=sql.105).aspx

 

I am not aware of any plans to make Reporting Services more cluster aware in the future…

 

Maria Esteban

Reporting Services Support Engineer

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 31, 2009
  PingBack from http://blog.a-foton.ru/index.php/2009/04/01/reporting-services-resilience-recommendations/

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2009
  Hi Maria, The link you provided for Planning a Reporting Services Deployment is specific to Reporting Services 2005.  Does the same hold true for Reporting Services 2008?   I am currently planning my deployment model for RS 2008 now and would consider the scale-out deployment if the report server could in fact fail over if one node fails. Thanks! Michael R.

• Anonymous
  August 12, 2009

• This is the link to the RS 2008 version:    Planning a Deployment Topology    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms157293.aspx  

• This is the link to the RS 2005 version:    Planning a Reporting Services Deployment    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms157293(SQL.90).aspx