December 13, 2021 at 8:39 pm
I'm learning SSRS at this time - I have a SQL Server developer edition, SSRS service and Report Builder installed all in a same VM running on my laptop.
I'm trying to figure out what's the best practice setup for production scenarios? I figured the Reporting services will be installed on a web server, which, will be a separate server than SQL Server? And the Report Builder is installed on the developer's machine?
Any documentations to best practices for setup or security in production is appreciated.
Thank you
December 13, 2021 at 9:03 pm
I think a lot of it falls under "it depends". IF you have the licenses, I would recommend putting it on a separate machine. BUT SSRS needs a SQL license and SQL Server needs a license. So at a minimum you need 2 licenses (UNLESS your license vendor can get you some sort of deal, but I've not seen that before).
If you DO have them on the same machine, make sure you leave enough free RAM for SSRS to use as SQL, by default, will use up to 2 TB of RAM which is separate from SSRS memory. I have my system set up with 40 GB set aside for SSRS and SSIS to share and the rest of it is used up by SQL Server.
As for security, the "best practice" depends on your requirements. If it is ONLY being used internally, then I would make sure it is not accessible from the internet. As for permissions to folders/reports, best practice is "least privilege model". Only grant people permission to things they need access to.
My preference is to use Visual Studio rather than report builder as it is more versatile and I find it tends to behave better. But if you are comfortable with report builder, then you can keep using that.
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.
December 13, 2021 at 9:39 pm
Unless there is a requirement to scale-out your SSRS deployment - then I would not recommend hosting the databases on a separate instance of SQL Server. Just install both the database engine and the reporting services on a single system.
The advantage to a single system approach is that you can upgrade regardless of the state of the systems you query for the reports. It can also be less expensive to host SSRS on its own server - and purchase Enterprise Edition licenses so you can use data-driven subscriptions and other enterprise features, and maintain your application servers on Standard Edition.
If you do need to scale-out, then it might make sense to host the databases separately - but that depends on your HA/DR requirements. Nothing wrong with having one of the SSRS servers hosting both the database and reporting services - and the others only hosting reporting services.
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