ASP.Net + Load Balancing + Reports (Crystal or SSRS)

We currently have two web servers (Windows Server 2008 Standard, IIS7) setup to host an ASP.Net website and are using the basic features of our hardware firewall to provide network load balancing (NLB) between the two servers. This means we have had to change the ASP.Net session state mode to SQL Server in order to make the data stored in session accessible no matter which server responds to the request. The main issue now is that crystal reports (basic edition packaged with VS2008) do not seem to support serialization which is needed in order to store/transfer the report to session state on SQL Server.

From what I have read so far in order to get crystal reports working in a web farm environment it seems the only option is to upgrade to Crystal Reports Server and load the reports from a third server.

Another option may be to use SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) as we a开发者_高级运维lready have this so no extra cost involved, however I'm not sure if SSRS would resolve the issue with storing reports in session?

Does anyone have any experience/suggestions of setting up crystal reports or SSRS in a web farm environment?

---

Have you considered the ARR and URL Rewrite modules for IIS instead of NLB? Not sure if that would fix the situation or not, but something to think about. I've got ARR in front of a client's SSRS setup right now, no difficulties reported, and it's 100% modern IIS, rather than legacy NLB which is less flexible when it comes to web-centric activities.

Is Crystal Reports itself dependent on session state, or is that a choice of design in your application?

Does ASP.NET State Service offer a better option than SQL Server session state DB?

What do you mean by CR does not "seem" to support serialization? Do the machineKey values on the IIS machines match? OOTB serialization across machines is impossible in a farm if the key doesn't match.