Power BI Scale-Out Caching Master\Slave

[pdunbar]

All;

We have an On-Prem Power BI (Native Mode) environment.
We have two nodes in Scale-out. The nodes are identical.

What we are finding is that scheduled SSRS report caches run faster when there is only one node running. (no scale-out)

When two Power BI report servers are running, the reports take MUCH longer to cache

Each report has its own schedule (not shared schedules)

I am wondering if there is a way to set one server as the master and the remainder as slaves. much like how SQL manages subscriptions with a distributor

Or

is it better to set up a shared schedule for each report ?

[pdunbar · Accepted solution]

What we found was that with the paginated reports contention was created by the server attempting to run the same queries at the same time. 

Our solution was to found here ... 

we found that the Power BI reports continued to be refreshed from both servers, but the paginated reports were force to run on only one. This solved our concurrency issue. 

[v-luwang-msft]

Hi @pdunbar ,

Has your problem been solved, if so, please consider Accept a correct reply as the solution or share your own solution to help others find it.

Best Regards
Lucien

[v-luwang-msft]

Hi @pdunbar ，

 For High Availablilty there are two pieces to consider. First the catalog should be created and stored on a SQL Server configured for high availablity. More information for that can be found here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/failover-clusters/high-availability-solutions-sql-se...

Second for the Power BI Report Server itself we recommend a scale out deployment with several Power BI Report Server nodes across several machines behind a network load balancer (NLB). This can be read about here https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159114(v=sql.105).aspx

And I find an article about   Scale-Out ,It with the idea :The idea was that should one node go “belly up”, the database instance containing the ReportServer database would failover and be available on the secondary node, and the remaining Report Server Web Portal, also on the secondary node .In my opinion, this is the current best practice scenario.

To learn more details ,refer: 

https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/databases/sql-server/bi-sql-server/scaling-ssrs-sql-server-stan... 

Did I answer your question? Mark my post as a solution!

Best Regards

Lucien