How to spin up/mimic Power BI Premium for Development & QA?

[cyclist007]

Hi,

We have a client who has their own Premium instance/environment. And the reports (both Power BI and Paginated) deployed in their Premium environment (Prod) would be accessed using their AD credentials - but from within our application (embedded).

Is there a way to spin up a seperate environment/workspace for Dev & QA on our own Power BI tenant (without paying for the price for Premium). Reports will obviously be built in Desktop & Paginated report builder but need to be deployed in a workspace that would mimic the Premium workspace for testing the embedding, authentication & authorization from our application.

And if we need to spin up, can we use A4 (instead of P1) to keep it to hourly, or even maybe go down to A1 SKU? (i heard Paginated reports were going to be supported in A1 also eventually - with Gen2?) 

[collinq · Accepted solution]

Hi @cyclist007 ,

There is no way I know about to spin up a Dev Premium environment that has all of the characteristics of a Premium site.  However, you can get a handful of PPU licenses to mimic parts of Premium.  It is "mostly" the same but has differences in the sharing methods.  This link will be helpful: Power BI Premium Per User - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

[cyclist007]

@collinq  thanks, yeah PPU could be an interesting way, but will we be able to build & test embedding?

Want to eventually deploy this for Embed for your organization (user owns data) as the client has their own Power BI Premium, but the Development & QA needs to be done in a seperate tenant (which is not Premium), hence was trying to see what's best way to mimic a Premium workspace?

[collinq]

Hey @cyclist007 ,

I think that since you are trying to test, the PPU would be the best method since it is the least expensive alternative to mimic Premium functionality without actually having to purchase Premium.  Once you believe that you have it all tested out, then you can decide to purchase or use full Preimum.

[cyclist007]

@collinq Thanks for answer. Yes we will try out with PPU (have marked that as a solution for now)

But do also want to find out if Azure SKUs (A1, A2) or some other way is a better representative for Premium for Dev & QA - if someone else has had a similar situation (just like PBI Report server Developer edition mimics the PBI Report Server Enterprise edition)