SQL 2012 Reporting Services Gotchas with SharePoint 2010

Back in March of 2012, Liam Cleary wrote an excellent guide to installing SQL 2012 Reporting Services into a SharePoint 2010 farm in integrated mode. (You can find that post here.)

I’ve recently been using that guide to produce a proof of concept for a client, to show that I would be able to install SQL 2012 Reporting Services into their environment and what the steps would be. This PoC has highlighted a couple of gotchas that Liam’s post didn’t encounter or highlight, so I wanted to raise them here.

Scenario Synopsis: Installing SQL 2012 Reporting Services on a new server that is being integrated with an existing SharePoint 2010 farm.

Gotcha Number 1

You cannot use Windows Server 2012 to host the SQL 2012 Reporting Services engine as you need to install the SharePoint 2010 binaries on this server. SharePoint 2010 SP1 does not currently support Windows Server 2012. This support will arrived with SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 2, however at the time of writing, there is currently no release date for this Service Pack.

Ref: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2724471

Gotcha Number 2

When installing the SharePoint binaries onto the server that you will be installing the SQL 2012 Reporting Services engine, you must ensure that you copy the deployment method for the original SharePoint servers.

E.g. if you built on RTM and then updated to SP1, you must not use a slipstream media containing SP1 as this appears to cause an issue with some core language pack files not being upgraded. This error can only be surmounted by uninstalling the SharePoint binaries and following the original install method.

This error will come to light as soon as you try and run PSConfig to join the Reporting Services server into the existing farm.

image

Gotcha Number 3

All SharePoint 2010 servers must be running Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 in order to be able to install the SQL 2012 Reporting Services Add-in onto all servers in the farm.

This error will show up when you try and run the SQL 2012 install media on the existing SharePoint servers.

Gotcha Number 4

SharePoint 2010 must be running Service Pack 1 (14.0.6029) in order to install SQL 2012 Reporting Services in SharePoint integrated mode.

Gotcha Number 5

The edition of SQL used to install the Reporting Services engine, MUST match that used to install SQL for SharePoint. E.g.SQL 2008 R2 Enterprise must have SQL2012 Enterprise Reporting Services. in order to avoid this error when trying to configure SQL Reporting Services in the Farm.

The feature: "The Database Engine instance you selected is not valid for this edition of Reporting Services. The Database Engine does not meet edition requirements for report data sources or the report server database. " is not supported in this edition of Reporting Services.

It’s possible that you may be able to mitigate this issue by installing the database engine at the same time as installing the Reporting Services engine, and pointing the databases onto this instance during the creation of the service application, but I haven’t tried this yet!

You can use the following SQL query to ascertain which version and edition of SQL you have installed on the SharePoint SQL server.

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY ('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition')

In Summary

Following Liam’s original post, and taking into account these gotchas above, I now have a perfectly deployed SQL 2012 Reporting Services instance running in Integrated mode in my 2 year old SharePoint 2010 development farm. I’m quite happy that this proves the process for my client and will form the basis of my process document for their team to follow.

My next step, and probably my next blog post will be taking this to the next level and integrating SQL 2012 PowerPivot for Excel and PowerView!

Regards

Paul.

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