Multiple gateway installations for customers

[marmi]

Hello,

we have several customers, each of them use their own Power BI. Data is located in our server room for each customer. What would you suggest as a cost-efficient way to create gateways (one per each customer).

- VMWare virtual server with gateway service per customer? (not the best way for us...)

- Windows Containers? 

- Docker for Windows...?

...

[v-haibl-msft]

@marmi

Do your customers use the same database? If yes, you can only install one on-premises gateway on one database machine, and manage users who can use the data source. Please refer to this document.

Best Regards,

Herbert

[marmi]

No, each customer has their own databases. The purpose is to have separate Power BI's as well. We don't want the customers to see each others reports, dashboards and data.

[v-haibl-msft]

@marmi

In that case, you just need to install one on-premises gateway on each database and configure the gateway for each customer account.

Best Regards,

Herbert

[marmi]

I think you mean one gateway for each customer, and data sources to the gateway for customer's databases?

Windows Containers/Docker cannot be used for this at the moment because the installer and the configurator does not support silent install and the containers are nano and core servers which are not suitable for this. This leaves VMWare virtual servers or pc desktop with Windows in it as an option.

[v-haibl-msft · Accepted solution]

@marmi

Yes, one gateway for one customer. And gateway can only be installed on Windows now.

Best Regards,

Herbert

[marmi]

Ok, thanks for your info

Just in case somebody is interested...

Windows Containers silent installation can be done by:

docker run --rm <your_container_name> powershell c:\<installation_directory>\GatewayInstall.exe /Q

you can find Gatewayinstaller.exe in %TEMP% if you run downloadable PowerBIGatewayInstall.exe first on some other machine

This installs on-premises data gateway 

c:\ wmic service where started=true get  name, startname

PBIEgwService           NT SERVICE\PBIEgwService

C:\>net start

On-premises data gateway service

There is no way (that I know of) how to run On-Premises Data Gateway Configurator silently after this with all the input it needs (email,Microsoft credentials,gateway name, recovery key etc.). The configurator is a Microsoft Installer:

C:\ProgramData\Package Cache\{0E277C24-0728-4FE0-B2F1-5C7DC7E30DD0}v1.15.6170.1\EgwComponents.msi

at this point I ended my study on multiplying gateways with containers. WMWare virtual server is the only solution which we can use for this.

[mcharing]

Hi Marmi,

I have the same issue and was wondering whether you have a solution already. I use one server for several customers; all with their own SQL server database and their own Power BI accounts and reports. These need to split and may never mixed. 

As an alternative I would use one server per customer which would create multiple server that would hardly be used most of the time but only needs a lot a performance during ETL time. This is not a cost efficient solution.

Is VMWare still the only way to go? and how I have to set it up?

Do i need to know more about hte Windows Containers (e.g. is it usefull in this respect of the problem at hand)?

Hope you can help me.

Mark