High-Availability Deployment Considerations

To create a highly available Reporting Services installation, an administrator can deploy Reporting Services on a web farm and use clustering for the Reporting Services catalog database. Enterprise Edition of Reporting Services is the only edition that supports web farm deployment in the production environment. Developer Edition and Evaluation Edition can be deployed on a web farm, but only in a testing environment. No other editions support the web farm feature.

Although the Enterprise Edition of SSRS supports a web farm, it does not include a functionality to create and manage a web farm. This is why a company would have to use separate software (or hardware) to create and manage a web farm. An example of web farm management software is the Network Load Balancing (NLB) feature of Windows Server. The steps to install Reporting Services on a web farm (scale-out configuration) are covered in Chapter 21, "Deploying and Configuring SSRS."

To protect the catalog database, companies can deploy a SQL Server 2005 cluster. Because of Windows authentication between the Report Server and the catalog database, both Report Server and the SQL Server 2005 cluster have to be in either the same or in the trusted domains. Both nodes of the SQL Server 2005 cluster must have an exact match and all hardware and software installed on a cluster must be supported; please see http://www.microsoft.com/windows/catalog/server/default.aspx?subID=22&xslt=category&pgn=904c28be-5a41-4db0-9c12-032dcb893c8b.

Alternative high-availability options can be used to protect from a database server failure: hardware-based data replication or the new peer-to-peer replication in SQL Server 2005.

Note

The new database mirroring functionality of the SQL Server 2005 would have been another high-availability option and although the database mirroring is included in this release of the SQL Server 2005the mirroring is not currently supported in production environments; see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907741 .