We currently have a 3 node HA cluster, with two nodes in a synchronous configuration and a third at our DR site as Asynchronous. We use one of the secondaries as a read-only copy. Our SSRS installation is set up to use the ApplicationIntent=READONLY keyword and fails over correctly using the read only routing list. Unfortunately we have hundreds of systems at work that do not have SQLNCLI11 installed. Plus they use Excel to extract data for their reports. This will not change anytime soon.
What we have done as a quick fix is create a DNS alias to point to one of the read-only copies. The problem is that if that AlwaysOn node goes down they cannot access reports until someone goes into the DNS and changes the path to another AlwaysOn node.
What would be good to have is the ability to create a Read-Only Listener, with a separate IP address. A report that would connect to that Listener or IP address would be redirected to the secondary node and have the ApplicationIntent=READONLY already set. This would easily allow me to control access to the reporting instance and not have to upgrade SQL clients and add ApplicationIntent for hundreds of clients and excel connections. I could just create a ReadOnly Listener that they could point to and they would always be directed to the read-only instance.
I know Microsoft does not usually add features to already shipping products, but I would like to hope that this could be included in the SQL 2016 release. It would definitely make managment of the reporting instances much easier.
Thanks,