SSRS – Using Subject Alternate Names With SSL

I was setting up SSRS for use with SCOM 2012 and trying to configure reporting Services to use SSL with the actual server name and a more user friendly alias.  We have a naming standard for our servers that includes department, service, and production state.  This results in some user-unfriendly names (such as sys-scomdb-p01) so we end up adding an alias in DNS and adding a Subject Alternate Name to the certificate.

Howeever, when selecting the SSL certificate in Reporting Services Configuration Manager, it only reserved a URL using the CN on the certificate, so attempting to access SSRS using the alias/alternate name did not work.

I could not find any informaiton anywhere  about getting SSRS to work using SSL and an alternate name on the certificate, so I looked around in the Reporting Services configuration file (rsreportserver.config) and discovered for myself how easy it is to get it to work.

First, remember that there are two virtual directories: ReportServer and Reports.  The URLs are reserved for each virtual directory in rsreportserver.config.  If you want to use the alias for both virtual directories, you will need to add a URL for both virtual directories:

  1. Look for the <VirtualDirectory>tags.  There will be a <URLS> child tag followed by <URL> and <UrlString>.
  2. Copy the XML code from <URL> to </URL> and paste it immediately below.  There should now be two <URL> tags inside of the <URLs> tag.   Edit the UrlString in one of the <URL> tags to use the alias.

If you look back in Reporting Services Configuration Manager, both URLs will now be displayed.

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