There is a plethora of instructions out there on upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, but relatively little on doing the upgrade where Reporting Services has been set up in SharePoint integrated mode. Given that there are a few gotchas that you can run into when doing this, I decided to put together this step-by-step, complete with the gotchas.
The most common scenario that will be encountered, given the vintages of the products will be an RS upgrade from SQL Server 2005 to 2008 R2. In addition, the in place upgrade is relatively painless (in the short term….) so I’ll be walking through a DB attach upgrade, which is just as applicable to RS as it is to SharePoint. Finally as I’ve written about previously, in a small farm, it’s likely a better idea to add the Reporting Services bits to a SharePoint front end server, than to add the SQL server to the SharePoint farm, and that will also be a part of our scenario.
The first question to answer is “why bother”? One of the advantages to using RS in SharePoint Integrated mode is that unlike Native mode, the reports, data connections and models are stored directly in SharePoint. It is therefore possible to just create a new RS database, and move forward. However, since subscriptions, schedules, and cache profiles are still in the database, it’s likely worth it to do the upgrade.
Step 1 – Back Up The Asymmetric Key
Reporting Services itself uses 2 SQL databases. One of the databases is for temporary operations, but the other database stores a number of important, and sensitive items for this reason, all sensitive items in the database are encrypted with a key. If we want to get access to these items, we need the key. To do so, we need to back it up from the source server before we move ahead.
Run the Reporting Services Configuration Manager on the source RS server, and select “Encryption Keys”. Click the Backup button, select (and remember) a password, and then save the key to the file system.
Once saved, copy the key file to the destination RS server (likely your SharePoint 2010 front end server).
Step 2 – Back Up the Reporting Services Databases
Run SQL Server Management Studio on the Server where the Reporting Services databases are located. Run full backups of the two RS databases. When complete, copy the backups to the destination SQL server (likely the server that will host the SharePoint 2010 databases).
Step 3 – Restore the Reporting Services Databases
Using SSMS, restore the two databases to the host SQL server. Once restored, it’s likely a good idea to set the recovery model to Simple, and the Compatibility level to SQL Server 2008. These steps aren’t required, but are recommended, unless you have a reason for not doing so.
Step 4 – Run the RS Configuration
If Reporting Services hasn’t yet been installed on the SharePoint server, do so, otherwise, proceed to configuration by running the Reporting Services Configuration Wizard on the destination RS Server. Configure the basic steps, and then when it comes to Database configuration, select the option to choose an existing database.
Select the server where you restored the files in step 3, and select the primary RS database (the one without the word “Temp” in it”).
Complete the configuration wizard.
Step 5 – Connect SharePoint to Reporting Services
From SharePoint Central Administration, select General Application Settings, and then Reporting Services Integration.
Complete the integration configuration, and then select OK
So far so good – now we’re ready for some gotchas. If you now click on the “Set Server Defaults” link in the Reporting Services section, you likely get a rather nasty looking error. You’ll also experience this error if you access ewither of the two RS URLs defined in the RS configuration wizard. The error is:
The report server installation is not initialized. (rsReportServerNotActivated)
This error happens when the server can’t access configuration information, and the most common cause of that is that it can’t decrypt the content. In our case, it can’t because we haven’t yet restored our key.
Step 6 – Restore the Asymmetric Key
On our new RS server, we need to run the RS Configuration Manager, Select Encryption Keys, and then click the Restore button. You will be prompted for the file that you created and copied in Step 1, and this is where remembering the password comes in very handy.
Once this is done, we can close the configuration manager and return to Central Administration. However, now when we try to access access any aspect of RS we get a new error:
The feature: “Scale-out deployment” is not supported in this edition of Reporting Services. (rsOperationNotSupported)
The reason for this error is that when we restored the key, it added an entry in the Keys table in the Reporting Services database, causing RS to think that we’re using multiple Reporting Services servers. This is what’s known as a scale-out deployment, and is only supported in the Enterprise version of Reporting Services. Obviously this isn’t a problem for anyone running Enterprise, but if not, it’s a showstopper.
The way to fix this is to remove the old server entry in the Keys table. Using SQL Server Management Studio, connect to the Reporting Services database, and open the dbo.Keys table. The old entry should be easy to spot as it will have the old server name. Simple delete the row.
Once the offending entry is deleted, RS should be good to go.
7. Fix up the content type names
I have posted about this already, but often, an upgrade will break the Content Type names for the Reporting Services content types. Just follow the steps in this post to clean them up.
8. Reconnect Reports with Data Sources And/Or Republish
In addition, moving connection files and reports around in SharePoint can cause them to be disconnected from each other, or for the connection files to be disabled. It’s a good idea to navigate to all of your reports to make sure that they are connected, or better yet, to republish from the source if you had previously used BIDS to publish reports.
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