I am deploying SSRS 2008 R2 in SharePoint integrated mode. The SSRS Service would be deployed on 2 servers. I have a hardware load balancer which will create a virtual IP Address. internally the VIP will do a round robin load balancing between the 2 servers. My question is that (in sharepoint integrated mode) is there any need for sticky session when doing load balancing for SSRS?MSDNStudent Knows not much!

Hi MSDN Student, Sorry for the delay. In general, its recommended to use Network Load Balancing (NLB) with sticky sessions in web applications. To enable sticky sessions for NLB, please see David Kleins blog below: How to Check that Windows Server 2008 Network Load Balancing (NLB) is using "Sticky Sessions" For more information about Reporting Services Scale-out Deployment for Load Balanced solutions, please see: Planning for Scale-Out DeploymentHow to: Configure a Report Server on a Network Load Balancing Cluster Hope this helps. Regards, Mike Yin TechNet Subscriber Support If you are TechNet Subscription user and have any feedback on our support quality, please send your feedback here.

Sticky sessions would be useful when you are doing a native deployment of SSRS. In SharePoint integrated mode, all the requests are coming from SharePoint and therefore a sticky session would mean that all requests get serviced by only one SSRS instance. because sharepoint would stick to that instance. Can you clarify?MSDNStudent Knows not much!

Hi MSDN Student, Thanks for your posting. Which mode to use really depends on the application being load balanced. If the application makes use of sessions which persist over multiple TCP connections, NLB should be configured in Single Affinity (Sticky Session) mode because you want to make sure that all TCP connections which are part of a single session are mapped to the same host in the cluster. On the other hand, No Affinity allows a better load distribution because it does not require client connections be handled by specific servers. Thus for applications that do not use sessions and for which it is acceptable for multiple incoming connections originating from the same client to be handled by different hosts in the cluster, No Affinity would be a better mode of operation. For more information about Sticky session with SharePoint, you can refer to the blogs below: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=166http://blogs.msdn.com/b/joelo/archive/2007/01/05/nlb-network-load-balancing-and-sharepoint-troubleshooting-and-configuration-tips.aspx Regards, Mike Yin