Forum Discussion
Helper IPower BI Performance: Premium M1 vs Shared
Hi all,
We are interested in the Premium offering. But are wondering if the M1 offering has similar performance over Shared for a single report. We are interested in it from a user cost perspective, if performance is not significantly degraded.
Regards,
C
Lets break this down, more for my benefit because I'm not following all the way.
License clarifications:
By "Shared" you mean "Pro" licensing I assume.
EM and A Skus are for embedding reports only
Premium covers embedding and end user consumption
Having a Pro license is a prerequisite for anyone who needs to build and share reports.
EM, A, Premium can all be considered add on's that support sharing to "free" end users. Those end users will not be able to share their own reports with others without a Pro license.
Having said all that, it sounds like this is a question about load/consumption that may cause performance issues. There is no direct comparison out there that I am aware of, but the Premium white paper does a good job of talking about the specifics of what is implemented behind the scenes. That can be found on the main articel about premium - https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi-premium/ where I'm sure you also have seen the cost calculator that uses rough counts for determining level of premium you would need.
I am un-aware of any documentation that outlines the type of machine or thresholds for the normal Pro license where many users share a common space, so there isn't a way to correlate or test this environment setup next to a premium one.
6 Replies
christoffeldg I think you mean "P1", this over simplifies what is offered with going the premium route but here are some thoughts. The report should work the same, the only challenge is with P1 is that you are purchasing the dedicated capacity and will be bound by that. The Pro license just puts you in a shared environment so there could be outside influences already. Either way, it largely depends on how much load your putting on the environment. Premium is a great solution for really large orgs, but I wouldn't assume that a P1 will just work depending on how large the user pool is and the activity, you may need a P2, or P3...
christoffeldgHi Seth,
Many thanks for your response. But I actually meant the lowest capacity available, EM1.
It's interesting to start with a low capacity so we can upscale when we see usage grow. However, we want to make sure the users have at least the same core experience as the shared environment. It is fine to dedicate the capacity of the EM1 to a single report.
In other words, if the EM1 uses 1 core back/front end for one report. How many cores back/front end is being utilized when the report is in the shared environment?
christoffeldg Ah. E sku. Sorry for the confusion. I would actually recommend looking at the A1 sku, which is the azure consumption based model for embedded rather than via Office 365. But in both cases, the only way the end user can consume reports is via the application in which you show it to them, not the Power BI Service. The Premium sku would allow you to share reports or apps via the Service or Embedded.