topic Re: PBI Report server & F5 Load Balancer in Report Server

PBI Report server & F5 Load Balancer

dsmudge35 — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 15:22:10 GMT

Hi, has anyone on this forum successfully load balanced 2 PBI Reporting servers using through an F5 Load Balancer? We are using https, but not through the F5. The SSL certificates have been installed to each PBI Report Server. I am keen to understand;

- How you configured your F5 Health Monitors.

- Changes made to the rsreportserver.CONFIG file.

ANy help much appreciated.

Thanks

Darren

Re: PBI Report server & F5 Load Balancer

d_gosbell — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 05:48:39 GMT

We've got PBIRS working on a 2 node load balanced cluster behind an F5. However I'm not sure what specific rules our infrastructure team setup on the F5, so I'm assuming it was some sort of default ruleset.

For the PBIRS configuration we just carefully followed the instructions here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/reporting-services/report-server/configure-a-report-server-on-a-network-load-balancing-cluster?view=sql-server-ver15

Re: PBI Report server & F5 Load Balancer

dsmudge35 — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 17:35:33 GMT

Thanks for your response, after spending some time today with Networks team showing me the F5 Config. http F5 Monitors work fine, its only https Health Monitors that are failing. This is because the F5 can only use an IP address for the PBI Report server. So it connects like this https://10.1.x.x/reports and fails with a 404 error. If I try and access this url through Chrome then I get the SSL cert error. I believe this is because the IP is not listed in the Subject Alternative Names section in the SSL certificate and also no url reservation in the rsreportserver.config file.

Therefore it seems the only way to fix this this, is to remove the https config in Report Manager, remove the SSL certificates from PBI RS server and obtain new ssl certs with the PBI RS IP address listed in the SAN section. Import again and do the PBI RS https config again.

Would be interested to know if this is how you have your certs configured.

Thanks

Re: PBI Report server & F5 Load Balancer

Anonymous — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 12:01:13 GMT

We are experienceing intermittent errors that could point to an error in the F5 configuration. We use Cookie persistence:

Do you have the same setup or different "stickiness"?

Re: PBI Report server & F5 Load Balancer

dsmudge35 — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 13:10:51 GMT

Hi, we have had this working successfully through the F5 with config of;

Load Balancing Method = Least Connections

PersistanceType = Source Address Affinity

Thks