FOUR QUESTIONS TO ASK

WHEN PLANNING A POWER

BI PREMIUM DEPLOYMENT

1. How will we allocate Power BI Premium capacity?

When you purchase Power BI Premium, you are purchasing an amount of
capacity (virtual cores) rather than a number of nodes. If you purchased the
P2 plan, you would have 16 v-cores. You could have one node with all of the
v-cores, or you could have 2 nodes with 8 v-cores each. You’ll want to take
into consideration memory and CPU usage based upon dataset sizes and
refresh rates, as well as the need for autonomy (dedicated capacity) of
departments or groups within your organization.

2. Who will manage each capacity?

Power BI Premium brings new management roles in PowerBI.com. In addition
to the Office 365 admin and Power BI admin roles, there are capacity admins
and capacity assignment permissions. Capacity admins can assign
workspaces to their capacity and update the capacity assignment list. Users
with capacity assignment permissions can add any workspace in which they
are an admin to dedicated capacity. It can be helpful to allow some groups to
manage that for themselves rather than to have to submit a help ticket to IT or
the BI team when they want to move workspaces in or out of dedicated
capacity. If you have multiple groups on one capacity, it might be best to have
a capacity admin from each of those groups. But those capacity admins will
need to communicate so they don’t overcommit the capacity and cause poor
performance for the other groups.

3. How will we assign workspaces to each capacity?

Not every workspace needs to be in dedicated capacity. As the number of
workspaces grows, all of your workspaces may not fit in dedicated capacity.
You could start out putting every workspace in dedicated capacity until it fills
up and then re-evaluate, or you could come up with guidelines as to which
workspaces should be assigned to a capacity. Some organizations leave all
personal workspaces in shared capacity and put all app workspaces in
dedicated capacity. Some organizations assign workspaces to dedicated
capacity to maximize their use of Power BI Free licenses for users who only
consume content. Other organizations identify important or frequently used
workspaces and assign only those to dedicated capacity.

4. Should we allow users to sign up for Power BI Free licenses

on their own, or block them from doing so?
Often, the deployment of Power BI Premium brings new users to your Power
BI tenant. By default, any user can sign up with their Azure Active Directory
credentials. Some organizations turn off that ability and require the O365
admin to assign a license to users before they can use PowerBI.com. This
might be a good fit if your organization requires training on Power BI or data
security before users may begin to use Power BI.

Power BI Premium can bring interactive analytics to a larger audience within

your organization, but it takes some additional planning and management. If
you would like help planning your Power BI Premium deployment,
please contact us. We would be happy to share our knowledge and
experience.