SSRS 2008 Installation Guidelines/Best Practices?

Question

I know I have seen recommendations for installing SSRS 2005 and it stated that you should separate SSRS from the DB Engine that hosts the data sources for your reports, that you should not install them on the same server.

Is there any documentation for SSRS 2008 that provides guidelines/best practices for installation? I am assuming that the same holds true for SSRS 2008 as it did for SSRS 2005 but have not seen it specifically stated anywhere.

We have a project that will utilize SSRS 2008 and there is a difference of opinion on where to install it, on it's own dedicated server or on the same SQL Server as the report data sources. If there is a link to any documentation that could be provided it would be gratefully appreciated, all I am finding besides what is in BOL refers to 2005.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I cannot point you to any specific documentation. However, I have visited the Microsoft testing labs in Charlotte, NC several times over the last 5 years to test SQL Server 00/05/08 SSRS based applications and was provided sage advise by the MS SQL experts.

They recommended that no other applications be run on the database server other that the SQL engine. This included SSRS. This was not easy at all to accomplish in the SQL 2000 product but become much more digestible with the scale-out options in SQL 2008.

It really does depend on the load profile of your application. You need to test and quantify the engine load verses the reporting load.

One consideration is that the memory and CPU consumption of SSRS '08 is significantly less that '05 due to re-designs in the reporting engine as confirmed by Microsoft and our testing.

My advice would be to load/stress test your application and adjust your hardware and deployment strategy accordingly. Using Microsoft Testing Labs for this is great environment because they have tons of hardware to test multiple scale scenarios to determine the options for your target deployment scenario.

I hope that provides some insight.