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Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
5 years ago
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Daisy chaining two PBI gateways?

TL;DR:  Can I forward data from one PowerBI gateway to another PowerBI gateway in a different domain, at a different location?

 

Greetings all, first time caller, long time listener.

 

I'm involved in a T2T PBI migration.  Currently, the source company has an existing PBI gateway pointing to their own O365/Power BI tenant.  This gateway connects to their on-premise data and on-premise SQL servers.  We are going to migrate the data to another company's O365 /Power BI tenant (the destination).

 

I know that a PBI gateway can only have one personal and non-personal route configured at any one time so my question is this:

 

Do we need to establish a second PBI gateway at the source tenant, which communicates to the destination tenant?  Or, is there a way to install a PBI gateway on-premise for the destination company that talks to the source PowerBI gateway and routes data to the destination tenant?

 

Full disclosure: I've only ever configured a gateway installation to route directly to Azure via the Azure service bus, but I'm trying to explore all options in the interest of completeness.

 

Rough outline of what the daisy-chained gateways would be doing (why yes I'm a terrible artist, how did you guess):

 

  • No. the gateway in the destination tenant would need a VPN tunnel to the source tenant directly to the SQL Server, or you would need to replicate the data from the source tenant the destination tenant (SQL Server replication) then let the gateway connect there.

    Or, you'd need a gateway in the source tenant (the Enterprise Gateway installed on a machine) that was registered as a gateway in the destination tenant. That might be the best. Restrict it to as few admins and users for that data source as possible.

  • Gateways are used by Power BI Service to retrieve data from inside a firewall and handle refreshes. You can't connect to another gateway, and only Power BI can connect to a gateway.

5 Replies

  • edhans's avatar
    edhans
    Community Champion

    No. the gateway in the destination tenant would need a VPN tunnel to the source tenant directly to the SQL Server, or you would need to replicate the data from the source tenant the destination tenant (SQL Server replication) then let the gateway connect there.

    Or, you'd need a gateway in the source tenant (the Enterprise Gateway installed on a machine) that was registered as a gateway in the destination tenant. That might be the best. Restrict it to as few admins and users for that data source as possible.

  • Gateways are used by Power BI Service to retrieve data from inside a firewall and handle refreshes. You can't connect to another gateway, and only Power BI can connect to a gateway.

    • edhans's avatar
      edhans
      Community Champion

      One other possibilty.

      Create a data flow in your tenant with the relevant data. Then allow those in the destination tenant to log in to that dataflow - the necessary tables. 

      Many possible solutions, but none that would be 100% of what a gateway would do. 

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable

    Thank you both sincerely.