Forum Discussion
Power BI Gateway Installation Best Practice
It depends on how your organization is set up. In my case, I have to access 2 different servers, both on the same network as the rest of the company computers, so I have a box on my desk dedicated to report services, on which I've installed our gateway. It has no trouble accessing any of the several databases on our network without being on the same server as them. The main advantage is maintenance of the gateway. If I need to do a restart or something, I don't need to do anything that might interfere with the server.
On the other hand, we have another "on-premise" server that is actually hosted by a different company, and in that case we have no choice but to host the gateway on that server. It's an immense pain, but the word is that we're moving off that server next month. Fingers crossed.
By the way, when you run the installer for the gateway, make sure you "run as administrator" so that the gateway runs as a service instead of an application. That way you don't have to actually log on and crank the thing up every morning. As long as the machine is running, so is the gateway.
Thanks Anonymous! Our situation is that we will have an on premise SQL server, SQLPBI, acting as the dedicated data source for Power BI reports/dashboards. Any other on-premise SQL data will be loaded to SQLPBI. I am trying to decide if we should install data gateway on the sql server, SQLPBI, or on a totally separated server.
- parry2k
Super User
PowerBiFunI'm using Gateway for many years and we installed Gateway on seperate box, we installed on a box which is running our ETL package. Originally there were bit of challenges with gateway and it was not stable, like upgrade an all that stuff was bit clunky, since it is much better I don't see an issue to keep it on the same sql server., but we still kept on seperate box so that in case of any upgrade issue, we don't have to restart our sql server. Although as a policy we try to keep production environment on seperate box.
Hope it is helpful!
PowerBiFunit sounds like you could probably go with my company's setup. As long as your server is on your domain you should be fine. Just install the gateway on a dedicated separate box that you can keep on at all times and everything should be fine. The only cases I know of that would require installing it on the server itself are cases where the server is off-network from the rest of the company, like a hosted solution of some sort.
