On-Premise Data Gateway or Personal Gateway?

[samanthamirae]

Hi, 

I'm having a bit of confusion even after reading many explanations. I'm simply just trying to schedule refresh my data every morning from an Excel file in a network folder. Would the personal gateway be enough or on-premise data gateway preferred? Would both or any of these refresh the dashboard when the computer is off or does the computer have to be on no matter what?

Thank you

[Anonymous]

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@samanthamirae wrote:

Hi, 

I'm having a bit of confusion even after reading many explanations. I'm simply just trying to schedule refresh my data every morning from an Excel file in a network folder. Would the personal gateway be enough or on-premise data gateway preferred? Would both or any of these refresh the dashboard when the computer is off or does the computer have to be on no matter what?

Thank you

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Here you go:

https://radacad.com/the-power-bi-gateway-all-you-need-to-know

Types of Gateway

Gateway comes in two different modes: Personal Mode, and On-premises. The difference between these two is not the paid or licensing plan. Both gateways are free to use. The difference is the way that you want to use the gateway. The personal mode is mainly used for one-person use, not for the team. On-premises gateway, on the other hand, is a choice when you want to work in a collaborative environment. Let’s look at their differences in details.

You can install up to one gateway in each mode on the same computure and you can manage multiple gateways from same interface on PowerBI.com

For example: Suppose you UAT env is on premise and you have SQL Data Warehouse running here. You can install up to one gateway in each mode on the UAT Server/Machine. 

Gateway Architecture

here are the details of architecture of the gateway;

1. Gateway installed on a machine in the on-premises domain. During this installation credentials stored in local and Power BI service.
2. Credentials entered for the data source in Power BI are enrypted then stored in the cloud. only the gateway can decrypt the credentials.
3. Power BI service kick off a dataset refresh, this happens through a service named Scheduler service in Power BI.
4. Data Movement Service analyses the query and pushes to appropriate service bus instance.
5. There is a queue of requests in service bus. Gateway pulls bus for pending requests.
6. Gateway gets the query, execute it on the data source.
7. After getting the result, gateway push that back to Power BI.

Important things to consider before installing the gateway

The gateway can be installed on any machines in the on-premises domain. However, it is not recommended to be installed on the Domain Controller itself. Here are requirements for gateway installation:

Minimum Requirements:

.NET 4.5 Framework

64-bit version of Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 (or later)

Recommended:

8 Core CPU

8 GB Memory

64-bit version of Windows 2012 R2 (or later)

How many gateways is required?

One gateway should be enough for many situations. However, there are sometimes that you would get more benefit with having more gateways. As an example, if you have a gateway that used for scheduled data refresh, and the same gateway is used for a Live Connection, then you get slow performance for the live connection if there is a scheduled data refresh in process at that time. So, in this scenario, you might consider having one gateway for your Live Connection, and another one for a scheduled refresh.

The gateway can be installed only on 64bit Windows operating system.

If you install gateway in personal mode, and then you decide to install on-premises recommended gateway on that machine, you need to clean the registry. This process is not an easy process to go through. My recommendation is to choose the version of gateway that you need on that machine carefully. If this is a server, then I highly recommend installing on-premises recommended gateway on it rather than personal.

Gateway machine should be always up and running to cater for data refresh queries.

Do not install the gateway on a machine which is connected through a wireless network. Gateway will perform more slowly in a wireless network.

Ports that need to be open for gateway are all outbound ports: TCP 443 (default), 5671, 5672, 9350 thru 9354. The gateway does not require inbound ports

[v-piga-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @samanthamirae,

If you Excel file is online such in Onedrive or SharePoint Online, I'm afraid that does not need to configure the gateway. 

For files loaded from OneDrive, automatic refresh occurs about every hour for data that does not come from an external data source.

If you only want to set sechdule refresh for Excel file, you could use personal gateway, but we recommend use on-premise data gateway.

In addition, no matter Date Gateway for personal mode or on-premise, if your device is turned off, not connected to the internet, or asleep the gateway won’t work and the data in the cloud service will not be synchronized with your on-premises data.

For more details, you could have a reference of this document.

Best  Regards,

Cherry