Workspace licensing

Workspaces store and host data for users and this takes server resources to achieve. So, for most organizations, this will involve licensing costs. Power BI does have a free tier, but it is limited when it comes to capabilities as many of the advanced features discussed in this chapter require either Pro or Premium licensing. Most organizations using Power BI will opt for paid licensing after seeing the value they can get from using the advanced capabilities of the Power BI service.

Workspaces are accessible via PowerBI.com; however, they can be hosted in a shared Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment, or they can be hosted in dedicated environments. Dedicated environments are called Premium and have various capacity sizes, or SKUs, as shown in Figure 14.2:

Figure 14.2 – Power BI Premium capacity SKUs

The table in Figure 14.2 has been adapted from the table in the Power BI documentation, available at this website: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/admin/service-premium-what-is#capacity-nodes.

As you can see in Figure 14.2, each Premium capacity SKU has different virtual cores, or vCores, and memory characteristics that will be dedicated to hosting workspaces. P-type SKUs are for general enterprise reporting or embedding Power BI reports for your organization, while EM SKUs are for organizational report embedding. Some SKUs must be purchased through volume licensing, which we will not cover in this book. It’s just important to understand that there are different types and sizes of Power BI Premium capacity SKUs.

Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) allows workspaces to be hosted in the shared SaaS environment but dedicated resources are given to the specific Power BI workspaces designated for that user. Between Premium capacity and PPU, there are multiple options to meet the needs of organizations, while at the same time unlocking advanced features and capabilities.

Premium relates to workspaces because workspaces will be hosted either on the shared environment or a Premium capacity or will be identified as having PPU. When this happens, there will be additional capabilities unlocked for the workspace, which will be covered in later sections, such as monitoring usage and performance.

Let’s next look at how workspaces can help with distributing reports and dashboards.