Monday, January 16, 2012

SSRS no longer using IIS


For those who haven't discovered this yet: Since SQL Server 2008, Microsoft decided that the reporting services web sites should no longer run in IIS.

This may seem a strange decision, but there is some logic to it. For one thing, you don't need to install IIS in order to run reporting services. I suppose it also prevents guys like me from fiddling with IIS settings that could break the report server, but now I've lost an aspect of control, which is rather frightening. And I don't think I'm a control freak.

It is what it is though and I cannot change that. So after a bit of research, I uncovered that this is done by SSRS using http.sys directly. Which begs the obvious question of whether this will cause a port conflict (if one assumes most sites and report server installs will both use the default port 80).

But alas it seems not. This technet article explains how http.sys handles these apparent port conflicts. It seems the only time there might be an issue is if you choose to install another virtual directory using the same name as the report server. I cannot think of any scenario where you would have a good and unavoidable reason to want to do this, so that should not be much of a problem.

Also see this post by Andrew Fryer highlighting some of the benefits of doing it this way. Ultimately it makes good sense and I don't imagine MS would change course any time soon.

Editorial note: This article was written some time ago for a blog that I never really got into very much, so just transferring it here to get all my content in one place. I know it's old news!

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