Using a local source with cluster gateway

[Benoit_L]

Hello !

I have a local source on my computer. It works fine.

I use a cluster gateway with many computers in the cluster, including my own computer with the local source. The local source is NOT on the other gateway computers.

I can link that gateway to my dataset, I get an error saying that not all gateways in the cluster can access the local file, which is 100% normal as it is stored locally only on one gateway computer.

Question 1 : when my computer is offline, the entire gateway is tagged "offline" even though other computers in the cluster are online. Is it normal ?

Question 2 : how can I refresh the data when my computer is offline ? I would expect ALL sources EXCEPT the local source on the offline computer to update, but it looks like the entire update fails for just one source missing. What can I do ?

Please note that everything works fine when my computer is online. So I would just like to make the cluster gateway work even with my computer offline.

Thank you for reading and helping 🙂

[Seth_C_Bauer · Accepted solution]

@Benoit_L I can't say I completely follow this, but I don't see why you would add an enterprise gateway to your local machine. Just offload that to servers that are always online.

For your second part, you need to move all files to accessible locations at all times if you are running refreshes. Get the local files into a shared location. Power BI is an all or nothing refresh, if all the files are accessible it will refresh, if something is missing, it breaks.

[Benoit_L]

Thank you @Seth_C_Bauer for your reply

About the first part, we are a small business so we do not have dedicated servers (at least at the moment, may change in the future). That's why I have configured multiple computers (including mine) into a cluster, to be sure to have always at least one online. I am taking any advice for doing this better.

Also I regularly update that local source on my computer, so I can not move it to a server (or I would have to upload it to the server each time I want to update PBI, which kind of breaks the process).

About the second part, ok thank you for the explanation. I now understand how it works.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@Benoit_L A different option would be to spin up a small VM in Azure. Using Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) you could provision a machine to handle the gateway. Shouldn't be to much setup work and Iaas acts like a server on premises so it should work without any issues.