Power BI Report Server and Power BI Pro License

[sudhir_ch]

Hi,

I did install Power BI Report Server on one of our servers. To create and publish reports to this Power BI Report Server, it should be done through a Power BI Pro account right?

To validate this Power BI Pro license is there any Enterprise License alternative other than connecting to the Microsoft Cloud?  We are looking for options to validate our Pro licenses internally on-premises. For security reasons, we have restricted internet access to most of the domains. Please let me know the options.

We are using SQL Server Enterprise+SA license for Power BI Report Server.

-Thanks

[jmelton]

We are in a similar situation as posted here . I feel this may be a significant miss in the product offering for Power BI Report Server implementations. Most organizations which choose this route are doing so because they need to stay on-premise, for whatever reasons. We have invested significantly in Power BI Report Server implementation and the in-ability to disconnect, disable, and/or control key cloud service integrations has now created a critical risk for our ability to rollout and adopt Power BI as our primary BI and analytics platform. We have also considered blocking the Power BI URLs on our firewall, however this is not the right approach but rather a stop-gap with widesweeping impacts on other subsidiaries within our global organization. I feel this is a paramount gap in the Power BI Report Server (on-premise) offering. Hoping to find a work around until this can be addressed in an enterprise fashion as part of regular releases to the cloud service.

Disable/Prevent/Restrict/Block publish to cloud service for Power BI Report Server implementations

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Report-Server/Disable-Prevent-Restrict-Block-publish-to-cloud-servi...

Best Regards

[Greg_Deckler]

Yes, to publish to a Report Server on-premises you are supposed to have a Pro license. 

Connecting to the cloud would be the way to do it. If you want to keep it completely on-premises, I'm not aware of a clean way of doing that. You'd have to export your Pro user list from Microsoft using PowerShell or something and dump it into an on-premises database or something.

[sudhir_ch]

Is there any article or any relevant resource that I can look into for doing something like that for on-premises licensing of Power Bi pro. I've been searching a lot, but couldn't find any.

[Greg_Deckler]

Are you talking about the PowerShell?

[sudhir_ch]

Yes. Anything that can try to help me stay on-premises for validating the Pro licenses. 

[Greg_Deckler]

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Export-a-Licence-b200ca2a

https://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/147109-powershell-script-to-export-license-and-objects-from-...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/powershell/manage-office-365-with-office-365-p...

[sudhir_ch]

There is also another version of Power BI Desktop (optimized for Power BI Report Server) right. I don't see a need to login for Power BI Pro account in that. So is it necessary to have a Pro subscription create and upload reports to the on-prem Power BI report Server?

[muchinski]

It is not an technical issue that avoid you to use the tool, but a contract/compliance matter.

[sudhir_ch]

Exactly. Compliance matters. We did purchase pro license subscriptions to all the report developers for creating and uploading reports to the power bi report server which is installed on-prem(using Enterprise + SA). Ours is a typical environment or I have to say more of a confidential environment, where access to most of the websites is not available. Even to the Microsoft login site, i guess it is taken away because there might be chances of sharing the data\information to the outside world other than our closed environment. So we cannot login to the Pro account from the Power Bi Desktop application.

@Greg_Deckler did give me a solution for extracting the Pro licenses using powershell and assign it to the users by that we don't need to provide microsoft website login access to all the users in the environment. But it is more of an office 365 administrative solution I guess. Correct me if I'm wrong. We don't use office 365 in our environment. So I cannot see that as an option.

So I think getting the access to the Microsoft website is only the solution to validate our Power BI pro licenses. Use of Power BI is driving us crazy in a very much controlled environment with all the security contraints which are in place to the protect everything in every way possible.