advice on SQL reporting services deployment placement for EV reporting

[rms373]

Hello, We're currently running EV 7.0 SP5 (recently upgraded from EV 6.0 and on our way to EV 7.5) on Windows Server 2003 SP2 x32. The EV SQL db's are located on a standalone SQL 2005 SP2 server also running Windows Server 2003 SP2 x32. Since SRS was not installed on the EV server at the time of upgrade, EV reporting now needs to be installed, so I'm hoping to get some advice on where to install EV reporting. Like others, our SQL server and the SRS instance on there is shared by several applications. What would be the ideal placement of EV reporting in my scenario? Should I install SRS on the EV server and then install EV reporting there, will this cause issues with the SQL db's being on the separate dedicated SQL server? or should i run the EV reporting setup on the SQL server? We have a relatively small deployment of EV and i think the EV server would be able to handle running SRS. I'll also be looking to upgrade to EV 7.5 soon (and to 8 eventually) so should i wait to upgrade to 7.5 before installing reporting? and so likewise i don't want to encounter any major issues with EV reporting and SRS as i upgrade to latter versions. Any thoughts and recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

[JesusWept3]

To be honest, the reports have such little overhead that i would keep it on the EV server just for ease of use.
The problem you will find though with EV8 is that it makes changes to the Reporting servers configuration files so that the EV Authorization manager can be used to control access to who can view and manage reports etc, the problem is, this impacts the entire report server, so you will find users who were able to access another products reports, now can't because of the EV restrictions. Also it generally slows down the MSRS as well.

[rms373]

Thanks for the advice JesusWept2, as you suggest - reading through the other forum threads and the like it seems best to keep MSRS on the EV server.
I was just wanting to avoid un-necessary complication by having the SQL db's on one server and the report functionality on another, but it doesn't look like having MSRS on the EV server complicates things.
Since i'll be installing EV2007 soon, shall i leave deploying the report until then - for any reason?

[JesusWept3]

well you don't have to have a new Reporting server database, you can install MSRS on twelve different machines and have them as part of the same farm sharing the same reporting database

[rms373]

I see, thank you for clarifying - so i take it during the install of MSRS on the EV server, i'm prompted if i want to use the report DB on a seperate SQL server or something like that

[JesusWept3]

When you install MSRS and you then run the Configuration program you will choose the SQL server in which to place the report server DB
you can either choose a SQL server without an existing Report Server DB or you can choose the SQL Server to where the report server DB already exists

Once that's done you would join the server to the MSRS Farm, though you may need a key for it to join correctly.

The problems that I described above with the Permissions would only affect the MSRS server that you install the reports on (in this case most likely your EV Server) and would not affect any of the other report servers in the farm

The technote regarding performance and permissions can be found here:
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/317967.htm