Chapter 44. Building a scale-out Reporting Services farm
In a SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services scale-out deployment, two or more report server instances share a single report server database. This type of deployment enables you to increase the number of users who concurrently access reports and improve the availability of the report server.
Network load balancing (NLB) is a clustering technology offered by Microsoft as part of the Windows Server operating systems. The good thing about Windows NLB is that it’s available on nearly all the editions of Windows Server 2008 R2, unlike the failover clustering feature where you need at least the Enterprise Edition to have it configured. NLB uses a distributed algorithm to provide network load-balanced traffic for IP-based services such as web, virtual private networking, streaming media, terminal services, proxy, and so forth. This makes Windows NLB an ideal choice for SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services because it’s hosted as a web service.
