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Reporting Services 2014 Database High Availability SQL 2014 Encryption Key RRS feed

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    For Reporting Services 2014, we are trying to make the database highly available.  Before we do a failover, an encryption key must be backed up.  We failover the server so that it goes to the other node.  My DBA instructs me to restore the saved encryption key.

    To me, this defeats the purpose of having failover capability.  The fact that one must do something manually in order to make it work is stunning.  Is anyone else out there doing this?  Do you also require an encryption key restore?

    Tuesday, March 31, 2015 11:13 AM

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    Hi Bryan Shaw,

    SSRS doesn't provide automatic failover, if primary database is down. You must do manual failover (reconfiguring RS to point the secondary server).

    SQL Server offers failover clustering support with Standard Edition. This will mean that if you’re using Standard edition SSRS, you will need to handle the backup & restore of the symmetric key in the report server database in order to achieve a failover. This can be difficult since the symmetric key needs to be protected (it encrypts users names & passwords  stored in the report server database).  So you don’t want just anyone being able to get a copy of it and knowing the password used to encrypt the symmetric key itself. 

    Due to this, you can also purchase Enterprise Edition to have a scale-out deployment of SSRS. SSRS is designed to achieve High Availability through a Scale-Out architecture which is your best option for achieving High Availability with Reporting Services.

    More details information, please reference to below article:
    High Availability (Reporting Services)
    High Availability – Frequently Asked Questions about Failover Clustering and Reporting Services
    How to setup SSRS high availability with Standard Edition

    If you still have any problem, please feel free to ask.

    Regards,
    Vicky Liu

    Vicky Liu
    TechNet Community Support


    • Proposed as answer by Vicky_Liu Tuesday, April 7, 2015 2:16 AM
    • Marked as answer by Vicky_Liu Wednesday, April 8, 2015 1:02 AM
    Wednesday, April 1, 2015 9:09 AM