What is the Frabric SKU equivalent to a basic shared capacity (non-premium)

[molegris]

Hi,

I this post that talks about considerations when evaluating what Fabric SKU your organisation needs.

Solved: Power BI Users and Fabric CU Planning - Microsoft Fabric Community

But, like many other similar post, it compares it to the Power BI premimum capacities.

In my organisation, we are all Power BI Pro users (from our global A5 licence) but we do not have any premium capacity. I managed to build a medalion architecture (with 3 workspaces), share semantic models, and pusblish and App containing about 15 reports. We never had any problems loading data and users have never complained about performance when using the App.

Now, we want to take advantage of all the nice items MS Fabric has to offer, so I've looking at buying an "F" SKU. I know the 2TB that comes with the lower F2 SKU are enough for us, but what about computing power?? Since we never had a Premium capacity, I have nothing to compare it to.

So my question is : What capacity (F?) would give us a similar experience as the "basic shared non-premium" capacity we've used in the past 5 years and always been ok with?

Thank you

--mo

[lbendlin]

Keep in mind that Premium started at F64 level (the P1 SKU), roughly equivalent to 25 GB RAM etc. Sounds like that is way more than you need.  

Also keep in mind that you can scale your F SKU up and down.  So you could theoretically start with an F1 and then scale that up if it becomes too small/slow.

Also keep in mind that "real"  Fabric features require at least a F64, so you need to manage expectations accordingly.

[molegris]

Hi @lbendlin , thanks for your response.

Can you be more specific reagarding the Fabric features that are excluded in F-SKUs under F64 ?  The only thing I could find in this blog and in MS docs, is the ability for view reports with a Fabric Free (previously Power BI Free) licence.  Which is irrelevant in our situation because all employees in my organisation have the M365-A5 licence that comes with a Power BI Pro subscription which gives them the ability to view reports and Apps.

Since that seems to be the only advantage of F64/P1, we are not looking into in at all.

So I guess there's no other method then trial and error... I just wished there were more information regarding the default "shared capacity" so we can plan the transition to SKUs in a better way.

Best regards,

--mo

[pallavi_r · Accepted solution]

Hi @molegris ,

The only major feature difference in f64 to f2 is that it provides power bi and dataflow gen 2 feature, which is already covered with your power bi pro licenses for users.

Go ahead with F2 sku, and monitor the capacity usage with capacity metrics app.

You can always scale up and down as per capacity need.

One more suggestion would be to keep dev, test workspace separately so we can pause it in off hours. And production workspace will be in separate capacity. So dev work load will not interfere or pose capacity related error for business user accesing the report.

Thanks,

Pallav

[molegris]

Hi @pallavi_r ,

Thanks a lot for your response and your suggestions.

We'll start with F2 and see how it goes.

have a nice day

--mo