SSRS Deployment Configuration

  • What do you guys consider "Best Practice" for deploying SSRS?

    I was always of the opinion that SSRS should, when possible, be on its own server.  Not just the services, but the ReportServer and ReportServerTemp databases as well as system databases (pretty sure you cant have ReportServer and ReportServerTemp without system DB's too).

    Another school of thought I have seen is only SSRS services are installed on a separate server, but that seems wrong to me.  

    Thoughts???

  • randy.moodispaugh - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 1:56 PM

    What do you guys consider "Best Practice" for deploying SSRS?

    I was always of the opinion that SSRS should, when possible, be on its own server.  Not just the services, but the ReportServer and ReportServerTemp databases as well as system databases (pretty sure you cant have ReportServer and ReportServerTemp without system DB's too).

    Another school of thought I have seen is only SSRS services are installed on a separate server, but that seems wrong to me.  

    Thoughts???

    It really depends on what kind of load there is going to be with reporting.
    If you are going to need to scale out then you would want everything on separate servers and add report servers (not the databases - they'd be on their own server) as needed.
    There are plenty of scenarios where having the databases on a server with other databases is fine if there really isn't any contention or resource issues.
    The more servers, the higher the costs, more the maintenance, more hardware, and then you get to DR environments and lower non-prod environments etc.so that should be considered. It similar to how sometimes you may need single SQL Server for one database due the activity load - or maybe that one database is partitioned across several SQL Servers. And then there are other times where you can have dozens of databases on one SQL Server and everything is fine. But you wouldn't necessarily consider it a best practice to create a server farm for every database deployed as it just wouldn't make sense. 

    Sue

  • Another thing to think about is licensing cost.
    SSRS requires a SQL license.  So if you put your database and SSRS server on different physical servers, you will need 2 sets of licenses.  I am not positive how SQL licensing works on VM's as we don't have that set up so and we have no intention of setting that up so I have not looked too deeply into that.
    We have multiple SQL instances running on a single physical machine which also hosts our SSRS server.  We have our heavy use SQL instances on their own physical machines, but the low use ones sit all on 1 box with the SSRS server and it seems to work fine.

    The above is all just my opinion on what you should do. 
    As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it.  Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
    I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.

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