April 28, 2017 at 12:15 pm
Hi folks,
I did a search but couldn't find anything regarding "scaling" in the SSRS section. Sorry in advance for starting a new thread if this has been asked before.
I have possibly the smallest SSRS build possible. One VM running the SQL database and Reporting Service and serving it up on the web. We scaled the VM up from its original config, so it now has 4vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM. This helped a bit in terms of being able to dedicate more threads to subscription processing. But it's still at the ragged edge of what we need performance-wise. We need to scale out.
I have found various technical docs online that go over how to do it, etc. But I have a question I haven't seen answered--licensing. Let's say we were to take our config to 3 machines. One for the DB server and a load-balanced pair for reporting services. Would we need then 3 separate licenses for SQL Enterprise (we use data driven subscriptions)? Or just one for the DB server? Or enterprise on the DB server and standard on the reporting services only machines?
Thanks in advance for the help.
--Andy
April 30, 2017 at 5:40 pm
It's generally every installation of SSRS needs a license, so three, but you should check with whoever you work with for your MS licensing.
Editions depend on how you are setting up the nodes. Some people dedicate a node to background processing such as subscriptions but if you need both nodes using data driven subscriptions then it's usually two enterprise licenses for that piece. That's just in general but so many licensing agreements have differences that it's best to work with whoever you do your MS licensing with.
Sue
May 1, 2017 at 12:13 pm
Sue_H - Sunday, April 30, 2017 5:40 PMIt's generally every installation of SSRS needs a license, so three, but you should check with whoever you work with for your MS licensing.
Editions depend on how you are setting up the nodes. Some people dedicate a node to background processing such as subscriptions but if you need both nodes using data driven subscriptions then it's usually two enterprise licenses for that piece. That's just in general but so many licensing agreements have differences that it's best to work with whoever you do your MS licensing with.Sue
Scale-out deployment is an Enterprise only feature - so you would need Enterprise licensing on each server. For each web server (Reporting Service) - you would need a minimum of 2 CPU's which is a single license pack. To handle your requirements you really should have 4 CPUs on each server...
The server hosting the databases really only needs 2 CPUs for the database processing - and you could even co-locate the report server databases on an existing system to reduce cost. If you have a system that has excess resources you could install a second instance on that system to host the SSRS databases...
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May 1, 2017 at 12:41 pm
Thanks for the answers folks. Looks like the Enterprise licenses would be by far the largest piece of the total cost of scaling out the system...
May 1, 2017 at 1:28 pm
agerard 65681 - Monday, May 1, 2017 12:41 PMThanks for the answers folks. Looks like the Enterprise licenses would be by far the largest piece of the total cost of scaling out the system...
Yes if you are using Microsoft's scale out. There are some other implementations people have done on standard - search on: ssrs scale out standard
But it's not going to work like the normal scale out though, no option in Configuration Manager for Scale Out when setting up, etc.
If you continue with VMs, the licensing can be quite a bit different so you would want to check into that.
Being you just bumped the server up to 16 GB and 4 CPU, it is still on the weak side of a configuration for a server so it may not be a good idea to add hardware with those specs. If you added adequate hardware, and then go down the path of an enterprise license, both going to cost.
Sue
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