Announcing General Availability of Power BI gateway for enterprise deployments

[TPalmer]

With Power BI gateways, you can keep your data fresh by connecting to on-premises data sources. The gateways provide the flexibility you need to meet individual needs, and the needs of your organization. Today, we’re happy to announce the general availability of the Power BI Gateway for enterprise deployments, which enables centralized and IT-managed access to on-premises data sources for organizations/ departments. Get started and download the enterprise gateway.

Key new features since Preview:

We’ve added these new features after we announced the preview on Dec 2, 2015.

• Support for live connection to on-premises SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services, and SAP HANA databases from Power BI service

The enterprise gateway now supports connecting to Analysis Services (tabular and multi-dimensional) models and SAP HANA databases, in addition to SQL Server databases. Support for additional data sources is planned to be added over the coming months.

• Support for security groups as part of access control lists for data sources

Gateway administrators can now control who can publish reports that connect to a data source, by adding AAD security groups, in addition to users. This was the most requested feature during preview.

• Restore/takeover gateway

Gateway administrators can now restore, migrate or takeover an existing gateway by providing the recovery key they entered during configuration of the gateway. This way, you can move the gateway to a different computer without having to re-create data sources and re-enter credentials.

• Performance counter collection 

You can now view performance counters for the gateway on the server/computer on which it is installed for monitoring and to diagnose any issues.

In addition to these features, we’ve made number of usability fixes and bug fixes based on the feedback in preview.

Upgrading from Analysis Services Connector

On Dec 22, 2015, we announced that Power BI Gateway – Enterprise supports connections to Analysis Services models and published an upgrade guide for current users of Analysis Services Connector to help you upgrade your existing reports and dashboards. The enterprise gateway supports connecting to multi-dimensional models in addition to tabular models and provides better performance

With the GA of enterprise gateway, we will stop downloads and configuration of any new Analysis Services connectors. The existing Analysis Services connectors are planned to be supported for two more months until Mar 31, 2016.

To help you upgrade your current dashboards and reports that connect to Analysis Services models we published an upgrade guide, which is available here. You can install the enterprise gateway alongside Analysis Connector as well.

Roadmap:

Here are some features in the pipeline that we plan to enable soon:

• Scheduled refresh: Scheduled refresh for data sets is planned to be supported soon through enterprise gateway, in addition to personal gateway.
• Support for additional data sources: We plan to support additional data sources that can be configured using the enterprise gateway.

Please feel free to send us your questions or feedback directly to hybridbi@microsoft.com and join the conversation at the Power BI Community.