Installing enterprise gateway on a different VM instance than the one containing SQL Server

[kajaldas007]

Hi,

I am about to install and configure Power BI enterprise gateway on a VM instance that's different from the one that hosts the data source (in this case an SQL Server database).

I checked the documentation. It does not cover this scenario. All that it says is following:

"It is recommended that you install this gateway on a server that is running the data source you will be connecting to. While you can install it on a different machine, you reduce potential network latency by having it on the same machine."

My questions are following:

1) If I follow the instructions for installing and configuring enterprise gateway the way the documentation describes (as if the both the gateway and the data source are residing on the same VM instance), would it still work just like that? Or do I have to take additional steps (e.g. ensuring the connectivity between the gateway and the data source, SQL client tools on the Gateway server, etc.)?

2) I would like to understand more on how exactly the communication happens between the gateway and the data source, in general (not assuming they are residing on the same server).

Please enlighten me.

[ankitpatira]

@kajaldas007 In my experience,

1. Provided both servers are able to talk / interact with each other / on same domains you don't need to take additional steps for letting gateway talk to data soruce that is on different server

2. How gateway talks to the data source also depends on data source type. I think it make use of sql connectivity tools to talk to sql server database but will be different for Oracle or other data source types. I haven't been able to find any official documentation on it so far.