Migrating SSRS manager to a new IIS server
We have a setup where I work where SSRS 2005 is running with the reports database on a database server and the report manager/reports are hosted on a separate IIS server. This works out good because it avoids the need to run SQL Server on the IIS box.
Now we’re upgrading to a new IIS web server and the move hasn’t been as straight-forward as I had hoped. Since this isn’t a very common setup or scenario, I’ve been learning things the hard way during this move. We are keeping the current IIS server up and running until the new web server gets tested.
So I started out by installing the Report Server components on the new web server. The install went fine until I started in to the Report Server Configuration Manager. In the Config Manager you can set what database the report server should use. I chose the current existing report server database on the separate SQL server. It turns out, that was a mistake.
I didn’t realize that because I was adding a second report manager/reports web site to be associated with the one reports database, SSRS assumed I was scaling out the report manager to a web farm. That’s right, you can not have two instances of report manager/reports web site point to one single reports database unless you are scaling out your web operations. It totally makes sense now that I know about it, but I don’t administer SSRS very often so I had no clue.
Doing this not only set up SSRS scale-out settings on the new IIS box, but also modified the old IIS box’s SSRS settings to assume a scale-out deployment. The result was all SSRS web interfaces were broken. I proceeded by shutting down the SSRS service from the new IIS box so I could fix things on the older IIS box.
On the older IIS box I had to get in to the Reporting Services Configuration Manager and navigate to the Initialization tab. The tab showed it was trying to initialize SSRS on the local box and the new IIS box in order to scale out (which is not what I wanted to do). I had to remove both items from the Initialization list, restart SSRS service, and things were working again the way they were before I started all this.
So how am I going to get SSRS running on the new IIS box? I see that I have two options. One would be to shut down the SSRS service on the older IIS box and then reconfigure the new IIS box to use the existing reports database. That will cause some down time that we can’t afford. The other option is to create a new SSRS reports database on the database server and have the new IIS box utilize that. It will be a little more work but seems to be the cleanest way to upgrade to a new IIS box for SSRS.
UPDATE: see the follow-up post to this here: http://weblogs.asp.net/justinsaraceno/archive/2009/05/22/migrating-ssrs-manager-to-a-new-iis-server-part-2.aspx