Using Both Power Bi Report Server and Power Bi Services

[mcrowe]

Our Organization is already using Power Bi Services. There are certain groups within the organization that need to utilize the Power Bi Services and others that would need to utilize Power Bi Report Server. In my example lets say you have a business analysis(1) who publishes reports using the Power Bi Services that the end user utilizes PowerBi.com to view the final report. Business analysis (2) publishes reports in a different department in Power Bi Report Server which its end user would view the reports in Power Bi Report Server URL setup. Is this possible and would it effect performance? I would love to hear from people that may have this situation going on at their company. 

[AbhiSSRS]

There is in general no difficulty in this set up unless you have features that work exclusivley in the Service only.

Now with respect to the performance it may entirely depend on the way your reports are :

If the datasource is on-premise for both the service and server ( server would in fact work faster and may be a upto 10X if your source resides on the same server as ReportServer)

If the connection is Live/Direct Query and on-prem source even then the on-prem is faster

If its import mode then performance is similar, RS may be slower in some cases depending on your server capacity

If you are working connected Live to Power Bi dataset ( as single source) then there is a major impact (upto 5-6X slower and recommendation would be to work with seperate source altogether for the onpremise reports.

[lbendlin · Accepted solution]

Assuming you have a Premium capacity - that includes Power BI Report Server too.  You can set that up in parallel to the Power BI Service Premium SKU, and run both as needed.

There are many (many) things to be aware of

- Power BI Report Server does not have feature parity with Power BI Service.  Some of the Power Query and DAX commands will not work

- You need a really powerful machine to host Power BI Report Server.  It also requires a SQL Server license but you likely already have that.

- You need a special Power BI Desktop client ("RS" version) to author content for Power BI Report Server which - you guessed it- does not have feature parity with the regular Power BI Desktop.

etc etc