Migrating all PowerBI content from one server to another

[Anonymous]

Hi guys,

I have 2 PowerBI report Servers; one runs on March 2018 (Server A) version and the Other runs on May 2019 (Server B) version, and I want to move all the contents from Server A to Server B.

There is a lot of reports in the first Server (over 500 reports) and most of the reports are linked to each other; and I dont want to do this process manually as it will be time consuming.

Can restoring the ReportServerPBI database of Server A to Server B do the tricks for me.

Please advise, thanks

[d_gosbell · Accepted solution]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Can restoring the ReportServerPBI database of Server A to Server B do the tricks for me.

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This might be dangerous as there are probably database changes between March 2018 and May 2019. If Server B is not currently used then you could uninstall the May 19 version, then install the March 18 version, restore the database, then upgrade the Server B instance to May 19.

Or you could write some powershell scripts using the ReportingServicesTool module to export all your reports from server A (using something like Out-RSRestFolderContents) to a folder somewhere then upload them to Server B (using something like Write-RsRestFolderContents). But you'll need to test this as I know this works with pbix and rdl reports, but I'm not 100% sure if this picks up linked reports or not.

[Anonymous]

@d_gosbell I forgot to mention, I had to upgrade both servers to May 2019 before restoring the databases and encryption key. 

The idea is to use this as a future approach.

[d_gosbell]

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@Anonymous wrote:

@d_gosbell I forgot to mention, I had to upgrade both servers to May 2019 before restoring the databases and encryption key. 

The idea is to use this as a future approach.

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Yes, once both servers are on the same version you can backup/restore the database and encryption key. But it's the installer that upgrades the database schema from one release to the next so it could be dangerous to just restore a database from a different version.

[Anonymous]

I was able to do this by restoring the ReportServerPBI and ReportServerTempPBI databases as well as the encryption key of ServerA to ServerB.

[abrownfl]

Even though this is an older thread, I thought I'd see if someone could answer.  How are agent jobs (refresh jobs?) migrated over when you restore the main and tempdb databases?  Or are they?

Or do you have to restore the msdb database from the source server also?

Thanks!

[d_gosbell]

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@abrownfl wrote:

How are agent jobs (refresh jobs?) migrated over when you restore the main and tempdb databases?  Or are they?

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The schedule definitions are also stored in the ReportServer database. It appears that when the Report Server services restart that there is a process that checks that all the expected agent jobs are present and will re-create them if they are not.

Our DBAs recently moved our dev server to a new Availability Group and we noticed that when the database was failed over from the primary to the secondary node the scheduled jobs did not exist. In the documentation for Report Server it states that after an AG failover you need to restart the Report Server service. After we did this all the agent jobs got created on the secondary node.

So after you attach the new ReportServer instance to the recovered database I think it should re-create the agent jobs, if not restarting the service should do this.