When I teach a SQL Server Reporting Services class, the question always comes up about licensing and scaling out your implementation in the production environment. The answer is, as always, “it depends”. I am not a big fan of studying licensing agreements, mainly because they are usually arbitrary, mostly contrary to the technical implementation and they also change like the wind. But people come to class expecting to save money with SSRS compared to Crystal Reports, so here goes…
I’ve blogged about licensing issues before. For instance, Microsoft does give us a break with multi-core processors, charging us by the socket not by the core. SQL Server itself uses the multi-cores as it would do multiple processors so licensing and technology are out of step – but at least it is in the consumers favor. Another situation where the consumer makes out, is with a Failover Cluster. Since SQL Server only supports an Active/Passive implementation at the instance level, Microsoft only charges for one license because one of the nodes is always passively waiting for failover.
Database Mirroring is the same, with the Mirror database unusable until failover, the Mirror server does not need a license if that is its only role in life. The exception here is if the Mirror database has a Snapshot database and queries are run against it to provide some sort of load balancing. Or if the Mirror server has other databases being used.
Reporting Services only seems to really pay off if you have everything loaded on the same machine, requiring only a single SQL Server license. That means your database server is also a web server. Not a good idea. Both the ReportServer database and the ReportServer application are loaded on the same server. This is fine for testing, but in production this introduces performance and security issues.
So in production we recommend separating the roles to separate machines, one for the database services and one for the web services for top security and better performance. At this point Microsoft are going to come looking for an extra SQL Server license since the ReportServer application is now technically on the Web Server. However, since Microsoft does not technically regard this as an official “scale-out” implementation (you need more than one web server for that in a Web Farm and will then require the Enterprise Edition on all machines), you can actually use the SQL Server Standard edition for both the database server and the web server install. But you will be giving up some “Enterprise” functionality, namely Data Driven Subscriptions and Infinite Clickthrough with ReportBuilder, just to mention two reporting features.
As soon as you decide to scale-out that web server into a web farm, you will pay a heavy price. The reason you may want to do this is if you have many users requesting reports at the same time. At this point, Microsoft is going to expect an Enterprise SQL license for each web server in the farm in addition to the database server itself. In this example, just by adding one web server at the front-end will cause your SQL licensing fee to go up by a factor of 6 assuming the same number of processors on each machine.
Do the math: Assume conservatively machines with a single quad-core processor. That’s 2 Standard Edition licenses at $6K each = $12K, while scaling out gives 3 Enterprise Edition licenses at $25K = $75K.That’s over 6 times the outlay for adding a single web server. Add to that your Windows licensing and, say, Sharepoint Services Enterprise on the front-end and you are looking at one hefty Microsoft bill (excuse the pun but the Microsoft guy in the Apple commercials does need to cut down on those doughnuts).
Sorry, Bill, your “total cost of ownership” story falls a bit short here. I think it needs a re-think.
Cheers
Brian
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Brian D. Egler, MCITP/MCSE/MCT 2009, is currently an instructor with Global Knowledge, teaching various Microsoft training courses. He is a SQL specialist with a focus on SQL Server, Windows, .Net and XML. Egler has been a technical instructor for over 20 years and has more than 10 years experience with SQL Server, data modeling, database design, application development including IMS, DB2, Sybase. Every year he runs the Boston Marathon for cancer research.
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