premium trial

Hi Tommaso -

If your customer is an ISV that is looking to embed Power BI into their own solution, then the new capacity-based Power BI Embedded offering is the right choice for the them. This article does a great job of describing the difference between the SKUs. The capacity-based Power BI Embedded offering is designated as the A* SKU (as opposed to P* and EM* SKUs) and can be purchased in Azure. The A1 SKU is the Embedded equivalent of EM1. Note that the A* SKUs are billed by the hour. As a result, they're a great way to try out Power BI Embedded in a cost-effective fashion, especially when paired with your free Azure credit.

If your customer would still like to go with Power BI Premium: notice that in the Office 365 admin portal, you may purchase both EM3 and P1 SKUs on a monthly basis, without the need for an annual commitment. With our new v-core pooling functionality, you can then use the v-cores obtained from said purchase to set up multiple EM1 and EM2 capacities to further test performance characteristics. For example, if you purchase the P1 month-to-month SKU for a month, you'll get 8 v-cores during that month, which you can configure as 1 P1, 2 EM3s, 4 EM4s, etc. Notice that you can switch between those configurations during that month at no cost.

Separately, you can also reach out to your Microsoft account team to discuss other evaluation options - they have a number of tools at their disposal to help with evaluation. If you're not yet working with an account team, you may fill out this form and we'll reach out.

Thanks,

-Sirui Sun

Senior Program Manager, Microsoft