Let’s take a journey together. I want you to imagine you’re evaluating Power BI for your organization.
You’ve already heard the marketing spiel and seen a live demo. You know the breakdown between a free and Pro license. You even believe that weird Dawg Data guy that the product really is as sexy and powerful as he says it is. You believe it could potentially have a place in your organization.
But you have questions – lots of them.
How do I roll this out enterprise wide for my 10,000 users? What’s the end user experience like? Which license(s) do I need to buy? How many mortgages do I need to take out on my house to pay for it?
Great questions. Have you heard about Power BI Premium?
No, but it sounds expensive. What is it and why should I consider it?
Power BI Premium is a capacity-based licensing model where, instead of purchasing licenses for each user (“seats”), you purchase dedicated hardware that exists in the cloud. This hardware, or capacity, is managed by Microsoft, lives in the same cloud as the Power BI service, and is dedicated exclusively to your organization.
But wait, there’s more! In addition to the lightning fast dedicated capacity, with Premium…
- Free users are now able to consume Apps and other content shared by Pro users
- The on-prem Power BI Report Server is included at no additional cost, allowing you the ability to move to the cloud at your pace.
- You have the ability to embed Power BI content in SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, or your own applications with the included Power BI REST API.
- Scaling resources up and down as needed is as simple as a few button clicks
Yeah yeah, sounds great, Chris, but you still haven’t answered my mortgage question.
Well, that depends on how/where you want to consume content, as there are three types of capacity-based SKUs:
- Power BI Embedded A
- Power BI Premium EM
- Power BI Premium P
The short difference is the A SKUs are Azure-based (pay as you go) while the EM and P SKUs are Office-based and require a time commitment.
John White at UnlimitedViz does a fantastic job of breaking down the differences between the three, as well as the different SKU sizes. I’ve borrowed his visual below to give a quick feature comparison, but would strongly encourage you to visit his site for a more thorough breakdown.
Well, “pay as you go” is difficult for me to estimate costs to my CFO and I want to have a single place for my users to go to consume content.
I completely understand and that makes perfect sense. In that case, I’d recommend the Premium P SKUs. You’ll see in the official documentation there are P1, P2, and P3 SKUs, but don’t think of them that way right now.
What you’re really purchasing are the v-cores, which is the muscle that powers your capacity. Think of it this way:
Unless you’re purchasing EM SKUs, you can only purchase v-cores in groups of 8, and each bucket of 8 – the equivalent of a P1 – costs roughly $5,000/month at rack rate.
So how do I know how many v-cores do I need? And what if I purchase too much or too few – can I change later?
The first thing I’d recommend is to take a look at the Power BI Premium Calculator. Now after you take a look and before you ask about the difference between frequent and occasional users, what we’re really asking about here is peak usage.
It’s not just number of users though. Scheduled offline refreshes, number and complexity of queries, and advanced feature usage (Q&A, R visuals, and others) should all be factored in. The Power BI Premium and Planning a Power BI Enterprise Deployment whitepapers are great resources to help estimate, and I highly recommend reading through them.
The goal is to purchase enough capacity to provide an acceptable end user experience. You can always purchase additional v-cores as needed, but downgrading is going to be tricky due to commitment requirements. I would recommend leveraging the calculator, the whitepapers, and a local partner when estimating.
Last question, Chris, then I’ll let you finish your blog post in under 1,000 words: how do I deploy Premium v-cores once I purchase them?
Here’s where your P1, P2, and P3 capacities comes into play.
All of the v-cores you’ve purchased are pooled together, waiting for you to assign them within the Power BI Admin Portal by setting up a new capacity, as seen below:
From there, the process is simple:
- Choose a capacity size – P1, P2, P3 – based on available v-cores
- Give your capacity a name
- Assign appropriate Capacity Admins
Now that you’ve created a capacity, all that’s left to do is assign App Workspaces to your capacity, and boom: you can now deploy content to free users with no need for licenses.
Last but not least, as more users start to consume content, upgrading a capacity from a P1 to a P2 is as simple as clicking the Change capacity size in your capacity settings. More power will be magically transferred to your capacity and end users can expect zero downtime in their experience.
And that’s it! Did I answer all of your questions?
For now, but I’m sure I’ll have more. Thanks.
Not a problem. Reach out whenever you have more and I’ll be glad to help how I can. Also consider attending a Dashboard in a Day, where I’ll cover the end to end development, deployment, administration, and consumption process.
And with that, I’m officially done talking to myself.
Thanks for going on this journey with me.
