Hi there to you all! I'm having a little problem with a new group of SSRS load balanced Servers. I have an F5 with SSL enabled in it, accessing the HTTP sites in two SSRS servers sharing the same SSRS database in a third one. Both SSRS are 2012 and have enabled just the http connection. We configured pools for the 80 and 443 ports in the F5 and then uploaded a certificate in it. So, we access the F5 with https and it access the SSRS servers with HTTP. In the SSRS Servers I added the <hostname> and <URLRoot> keys to the rsreportserver.config file. In the hostname key I had to configure the server name since each time I used the F5 alias it would give an access denied error while using the administrative interface. In the URLRoot key I am using https://F5alias/ReportServer. I can access both the administrative site and the Reports site without problem, but when I open a report the Url changes from https://F5alias/.../ to HTTP://F5Alias/../ Do you have any idea of what i am missing? A summary of my enviroment: * F5 load balancer with SSL certificate. Pools configured for 80 and 443, both pointing to the HTTP url of the SSRS servers. * 3 Servers with SSRS 2012 Developer Edition (it's a test): One with SSRS and the report database (this one is out of the farm), Two SSRS servers joined the first one in Scale-out Deployment (This are the ones being accesed by the F5). * The three servers are running Windows 2008 R2. * Reportserver.config: <hostname> configured with the name of the server. <UrlRoot> configured with the https URL to access using the F5. (https://F5alias/ReportServer). * All the components are in the same network. The problem: * When you browse the site using the F5 it works ok and keeps being an HTTPS url, but when you open a report the URL changes to HTTP. Thank you in advance and sorry if the post looks rambly.

You need to use the Reporting Services Configuration tool to do the URL reservation for your https://F5Alias, as those are used for the reports urls More details on how to configure it are in How to: Configure a URL (Reporting Services Configuration) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb630447(v=sql.105) and About URL Reservations and Registration (Reporting Services) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677364(v=sql.105) Jaime - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jtarquino/ This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

Thank you for your reply Jaime! I'm looking at your suggestion right now, however if I understand correctly doing the reservation for HTTPS means that I have to assign a certificate in the SSRS Configuration Manager for each node, is that right? I ask this because we uploaded to certificate into the F5 to test if we could avoid having to configure a certificate in the nodes of the farm. That way, we could have the certificate in just one point and make more easy future renewals of the certificate. Is there a way to reserver the HTTPS URL without assign a certificate? I know the question looks dumb but I want to give it a shot at asking :-) PD: Sorry if my english is confusing, I don't use it very often...

I don't think so, I don't know about F5 as a load balancer, but if you do that what will happen with the communcation between the client and the RS Server? , as the RS Server doesn't have a certificate for SSL so I can't see so the clients are going to communicate with it using a secure channel Jaime - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jtarquino/ This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

I don't think so, I don't know about F5 as a load balancer, but if you do that what will happen with the communcation between the client and the RS Server? , as the RS Server doesn't have a certificate for SSL so I can't see so the clients are going to communicate with it using a secure channel Jaime - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jtarquino/ This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

Thing is that the F5 Load Balancer have a funcionality where you upload a certificate and secure a comunication to a HTTP site. So you connect to the F5 as HTTPS and the Load Balancer connects to the sites as HTTP. We are looking into that functionality to lessen the administrative task of the renewal of certificates for our intranet sites. However I ran into this problem while testing it with the SSRS. Seems like It will not work with the SSRS. Oh well, it was worth a shoot. I'll follow the directions of the links you gave me to configure the nodes as HTTPS and then see if it works. Thank you a lot for your help!

Hello David, Thank you to post your questions on TechNet forum. I am not sure what is detail of your problem. Do you mean that the site is not stable, sometimes it shows up and sometimes it not? If so, I consider that you can check whether <DSN> section in rsreportserver.cofig is set same on three servers. If they are not same, then the report server will show that the authentication issue or fail to open the report. We have a document on MSDN about how to configure the reporting service under load balance. Please review the following article to see whether it can solve your issue. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc281307.aspx If you have any questions about this issue, please tell us freely. Regards, EdwardEdward Zhu TechNet Community Support

Hello Edward, What is happening is that we are trying a functionality of our F5 load balancer where you have your website in the servers with HTTP and you can configure the load balancer so that the user connects to it as HTTPS and it consumes the HTTP sites on the server, so that there is only one HTTPS connection between the client and the load balancer. However, when we tried this on the SSRS it worked until you would open a report. The report opens correctly, but the URL reverts to HTTP. As said by Jaime it makes sense, since the SSRS does not have a SSL configured, so it internally returns an HTTP url. AS it seems that this "issue" has no workaround, I'm going to configure the SSL in the nodes and configure them in the NLB as a normal HTTPS site. I thank you for your reply, but it seems that what I wanted to try out is not going to work. Thank you all for your time!

I have made additional investigation and there is a header called FRONT-END-HTTPS that you can configure in your F5 to allow you to accomplish what you are looking for, the detailed steps are in the Using SSL offloading section in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345223(v=SQL.90).aspx , look at it and let me know if it works for you. Thanks Jaime -http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jtarquino/ This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights