Clarification on Data Gateway cluster HA and Load balancing

[spencerhan]

Hi all, in case I have a PBI Data Gateway setup as below: 

The MSFT documentation states, 'The gateway cloud service always uses the primary gateway in a cluster unless that gateway isn't available. In that case, the service switches to the next available gateway in the cluster. Each cluster supports up to ten gateway members (sometimes called nodes).'

so, if I reimage or remove the entire DataGateway01 primary virtual machine, will the data source register in Power BI Service function as usual? 

Later, if I want to add another gateway node, say DataGateway04, to the cluster, will that still be the name DataGateway01? 

Lastly, say if I reimage all machines that participate in the existing cluster and then reinstall the PBI data gateway application but keep all the names the same. Do I need to change anything from the PBI service end? 

Looking forward to any advice.

Thanks in advance. 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @spencerhan 

For your first question , if you delete the main cluster, then the rest of the few will be deleted as well, because the other gateways are created based on this main cluster, this is something that you will notice when you install it, you need to select the main cluster and then enter the name of the new gateway before you can add a new gateway underneath this main cluster. 

For the second question , when you create a new gateway to go under this cluster, the name of the gateway is not automatically generated and does not go down in order. The name is defined by you.

For the third question , if you deleted the previous gateway, then even if you reinstalled the gateway and kept the name the same as before, then you still need to reconfigure the data source and re-match it with the semantic model. This is because once you delete the gateway, all the previous settings will be deleted.

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Ailsa Tao
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