How to scale out Reporting Services on SharePoint Integrated Mode over NLB

Question

I have a SharePoint 2010 Enterprise farm with the following topology :-

2 WFE SERVER (behind NLB 1)
1 APP SERVER (used for Search)
1 APP SERVER (used for other service applications)

1 DB Cluster without DR.

I want to configure Reporting Services with SharePoint on a load balanced architecture as described here using a NLB :- http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc281307(v=sql.100).aspx

My question is what should be the recommended architecture for a minimal deployment with failover capabilities for SSRS. My understanding tells me that there should be two additional servers added to the farm and made part of a second NLB. So essentially, the required logical architecture would look something like this :-

2 WFE SERVER (behind NLB 1)
1 APP SERVER (used for Search)
1 APP SERVER (used for other service applications)
2 WFE + RS SERVER with Reporting Services Addon Installed and SSRS installed (behind NLB 2)
1 DB Cluster without DR.(Hosting RS and SharePoint Databases)

Report Server is made to run on a DNS based hostname example -> http-reportserver and this points to NLB2. Additionally, hostheaders are updated on IIS in the individual Report Servers (WFE+RS) pointing to http-reportserver.

In SharePoint Central Administration , Reporting Services is integrated using the http->reportserver. I want to know is the above topology design correct or am I missing any step in this approach. Additionally, it will be helpful if I am provided with additional suggestions on this.

Answer 1

You don't necessarily need the Report Servers to be WFEs they could just be Reporting App Servers. However, you would need to install the Reporting Services components on to the 2 WFEs behind NLB 1 though. Plus if you wanted to host reporting on a different web application then you would need to create a new web app as well.

See the following article on scaling out:- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh479774.aspx

Something that I did notice in the article was that not all variants of SQL Server support scale out of Reporting Service, so check that out too.