Is this considered scale-out?

I picked back up an effort to get our reporting services DR scenario in place and am having some issues. Our corporate approach for production databases is to back-up the database to the local server disk, copy the back-up files to a remote office and restore the databases on remote DR servers. This process is scripted to run overnight so in the case of failure of the production environment we lose at most one day of work.

Now, I would like to set up a parallel scenario for Reporting Services and started with reading a bit of documentation. I read "Moving a Report Server Database to Another Computer" and "Backing Up and Restoring Encryption Keys" and then set to work.

I have two instances of SQL Server 2005 Standard installed as the default instance on two servers, PROD and DR. I backed up the encryption key on PROD and restored it on DR using the Reporting Services Configuration Manager. Then I backed up the PROD/ReportServer and PROD/ReportServerTempDB databases and restored the databases to the DR instance. Next, I connected the DR Reporting Services instance to the newly restored databases and clicked 'Apply'.

I get this warning:

"Setting Connection Info for Reporting Server

You specified a connection to a report server database that contains encryption keys for another report server. If you are configuring a scale-out deployment, that feature is not supported by this edition of Reporting Services. If you want to use this report server database with the currecnt report server instance, remove the existing encryption keys first."

And as you would expect navigating to the DR web application tells me "The report server installation is not initialized."

So, a couple questions?

1) Would this be considered a scale-out installation?
2) Did I miss some configuration step?
3) If I want to continue down this DR scenario do I have to upgrade to Enterprise edition?
4) Are there any suggested DR approaches for Reporting Services 2005?

Thanks in advance for you help.

Calvin

It seems you do not need a scale-out installation. The problem is after you set db connection from PROD to DR, their is an extra key in the RS database that makes RS think you are doing scale-out. Check the Keys table in your ReportServer database on DR. There could be two reasons for this to happen:

1) You configured report server on DR to use RS databases , so that the Keys table contains an entry for DR. Basically you need to decide if you want to access the backup RS db from PROD or DR. You can't access RS from both, for it is a scale-out scenario. Remove the entry you don't need.

2) For some reason there was an entry for PROD that is left over in Keys table, and you get 2 PROD entries. This makes the RS thinks you are doing scale-out. Simply remove the one that is invalid.

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Thanks for your response.

1) When I click the "Change" button on the Encryption Key tab, I see there are two servers listed. So, I believe there are two keys in the database but I don't believe it is as simple as just removing the key I don't need. I want to access the backup RS database from DR but the DataSource connection strings and such are encrypted using the key from PROD. If not by restoring the key using the Configuration Manager, how can I make this happen? Will Reporting Services throw a fit if I manually update the Keys table in the restored RS database in DR to make it use the encryption key from PROD but the instance information from DR? Is this even possible?

2) I believe the two keys are present because I told DR reporting services to "Connect" to the RS database which contained a key from PROD.

Thanks again,

Calvin

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I tried it again this morning and got it working. I believe the sequencing is where I went wrong. I'll have to do some testing to figure out what the correct sequence is but at least now I know it does work.

Thanks again,

Calvin

|||When you backup the key on PROD, the key is decrypted using the machine key of PROD and then encrypted using the password you specify. When you restore the key DR, the key is decyrpted using the password and reencyrpted using the machine key of DR. You see the key is always in encrypted form, and is preserved when you move servers.