Hardware resources for Gateway VM

[Anonymous]

Hi,

My client has recently opted for PowerBI and i will be the PowerBI admin. We currently have 100 active PowerBI pro users, eventually as the adoption increases the users will increase to 1000-2000 (expected in next 6 months). I need some help and advice on planning for the capacity of the VMs where i will be installing these data gateways on.

Please help.

[aj1973]

hi @Anonymous 

you are defenitly going to need a premium license capacity in the long run especially where the users are going to be viewers (no need for Licenses). you will be able to scale up the capacity depending on the number and capacity needed or use the autoscale

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-premium-auto-scale

Talking about Gateway, there is no specific hadware for it, only the server has to be a 64 bit. the Gateway then will be installed on premises but if the source is in the cloud then no need for Gateway.

[Anonymous]

@aj1973  currently every user gets E5 license which comes bundled with PowerBI pro. So buying Premium license at this point of time when there are only 100 users is going to be expensive. So we would like to continue without Premium (atleast for now). Hence i wanted to know the hardware configuration that i should request for the VMs for these gateway servers to ensure that the refreshes work fine (since gateway will only be used for refreshing onprem datasources). 

[aj1973]

@Anonymous 

Here you go

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/data-integration/gateway/service-gateway-install

[Anonymous]

@aj1973 thanks for sharing this however i have gone through it already, this talk about min requirement and installation process. What i am looking for is how do i decide on how much hardware resouce should i request for the VM i am going to install gateway on.

[aj1973]

Well the minimum requirements is good enough. The only functionality of the gateway is refresh. Nothing else Nothing more. 

Good luck

[Anonymous]

yes you are right, but transporting data from datasource to data model in PBI service via gateway will require hardware resources (RAM, Processor core, bandwidth), just as we would import queries in a data model in PBI desktop. So imagine there are 50 reports then there will be datamodels which need to refreshed at different times.

Correct me if my understanding is incorrect.

Thanks

[aj1973]

Hi @Anonymous 

Did you pick the right Hardware?

Please mark this thread as accepted for the rest of the community to know

[aj1973 · Accepted solution]

Yes and no....since the refresh will be spread into different times of the day then it wouldn't really matter. But to be safe pick a good hardware and all be good