Does anyone have experience with SQL Server Reporting Services? Is it possible to cluster this service on a Windows Server Failover Cluster?
In this case, would it be about installing Reporting Services on both nodes and then creating a generic role in WSFC? Does this work?
Of course, it would be active-passive, but with the ability to switch the service between nodes.
Also, is there any problem to install Reporting Services in the same machine of database engine? Is there any recommendation from microsoft to install in a different machine?
1 Answer 1
Reporting Services (SSRS) isn't cluster-aware, however, if you have Enterprise Edition, it does have high-availability capabilities.
There are two areas that need to be made highly available for SSRS - the web services and the databases.
For the databases, you can put them into an Availability Group or SQL cluster to provide high availability.
For the web services, you can create a Scale-Out Deployment and run multiple SSRS instances all pointing at the same database.
One way to achieve this is actually to install the SSRS instances on each node of the AG that the SSRS databases are hosted on and configure some manual post-failover tasks to handle post-failover cleanup automatically (essentially, after failover restart the SSRS service on each node).
You then configure the SSRS instance to use the AG listener name as the host header (access point). When the AG fails over, so does SSRS (sort of, it actually just redirects requests to the scale-out instance running on the other AG replica).
Another option is to install SSRS on servers other than the SQL Server nodes and to place these SSRS servers behind a load balancer. Again, this requires Enterprise Edition and a scale-out SSRS deployment.
NOTE: Each SSRS instance needs to be licensed. Check with your licensing reseller about any planned architecture to ensure you're compliant with your licensing.