Multiple Management Groups, Single Data Warehouse (part 2)

In this series, I’m going to talk about multiple Management Groups sharing a single Data Warehouse.  I’ll try to clarify two common questions that come out of this scenario.

Part 1 – Operations Manager Reporting Instance Where do these components get installed?

Part 2 – ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB
Where do these databases reside?

Here we go with part 2…

While planning a consolidated reporting deployment, some thought needs to be given to where the reporting databases will be hosted.  However, the restrictions set forth by the SCOM Reporting Instance do not apply for the reporting databases.  As described in part 1, the SCOM Reporting Instance needs to be unique for each Management Group.  The reporting databases can be hosted by any SQL DB Engine, which is not dependent at all on any Management Group.

Before I get into some common scenario’s for the reporting databases, I want to mention one caveat.  The Product Group does not officially support the reporting databases in a clustered configuration.  Although I have seen this configuration work well in some cases, I cannot recommend this configuration for obvious reasons.  This article from the MOM Team has served as an official statement of this configuration.

Scenario 1

I commonly see all reporting databases for each Management Group hosted on the Data Warehouse SQL DB Engine.  For example, a Data Warehouse shared between three Management Groups looks similar to the following.

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Scenario 2

Another option is to host the reporting databases on another SQL Server.  I can see this as an option for a situation where a Data Warehouse is shared amongst more than two Management Groups, and performance may be of concern.  More specifically, if the Data Warehouse is currently being shared between two Management Groups, sharing this Data Warehouse to an additional Management Group may push these hardware resources over the top.  If this happens, there may be data insertion issues, especially during times of heavy report usage in either of the Management Groups.

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Scenario 3

Another option is to host the reporting databases on the same machine that is hosting the SCOM Reporting Instance, as follows.

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Conclusion

As outlined here, the reporting database can be hosted by virtually any SQL DB Engine.  The scenario’s don’t end with what is listed above.  These are just some of the more common scenario’s.

The most important thing to consider is performance.  If your initial design was to host all reporting databases on the same server hosting the share Data Warehouse, and your report users start observing latencies and performance degradation, there are options to move these reporting databases to another SQL DB Engine.