The rights to deploy the Power BI Report Server to a production environment can be obtained by purchasing Power BI Premium capacity or via a SQL Server Enterprise Edition with the Software Assurance agreement. Power BI Premium is the primary and recommended method as this includes both Power BI service (cloud) dedicated capacity and the Power BI Report Server at the same cost. For example, a Power BI Premium P2 SKU includes 16 v-cores of dedicated capacity in the Power BI service, as well as the right to deploy the Power BI Report Server to 16 processor cores on-premises. Furthermore, the cores provisioned via Power BI Premium can be allocated to on-premises hardware; however, the organization chooses them, such as one Power BI Report server with all 16 cores, or two Power BI Report servers with eight cores, each in a scale-out deployment.
A Power BI Premium P2 SKU is highlighted in the following screenshot from the Purchase Services page of the Office 365 admin center:
As shown here, premium capacities represent a subscription-based model, such as $10,000 per month with an annual commitment. Currently, a month-to-month P1 SKU with eight v-cores (P1 for Students) is available, which doesn't require an annual commitment.
By licensing Power BI Report Server via Power BI Premium capacity, an organization can choose to migrate Power BI reports to the Power BI service (cloud) at a future date. For example, some or all of the Power BI reports deployed to the Power BI Report Server in 2018 could be migrated to app workspaces hosted in dedicated Power BI Premium capacity within the Power BI service in 2019. Additionally, as described in the Hybrid Deployment Models section later in this chapter, an organization could allow certain solutions to be developed with the dedicated Premium capacity in the Power BI cloud service, while other reports could remain on-premises on the Power BI Report server.
Once Power BI Premium capacity has been purchased, a product key required to install the report server will be available in the Power BI admin portal. The process for retrieving this key from within the Power BI service is included in the Installation section later in this chapter. Additionally, the details of Power BI Premium including the management of premium (dedicated) capacities and the additional capabilities enabled by Premium capacities for deployments to the Power BI service are included in Chapter 13, Scaling with Premium and Analysis Services.
As an alternative to licensing via Power BI Premium, organizations with SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance can use their existing SQL Server licenses to deploy Power BI Report Server.
One of the benefits of the Software Assurance program has been to provide access to new versions of SQL Server as they're released, and this benefit has been extended to include the Power BI Report Server. For example, if an organization has already licensed 24 cores to run SQL Server Enterprise Edition, with a Software Assurance agreement they could allocate 8 of those 24 cores to a server for running Power BI Report Server. Just like current SQL Server licensing, additional SQL Server products (such as SQL Server Integration Services) could also be deployed on the same eight-core server. It's essential to realize that, unlike Power BI Premium, this licensing method does not provide access to the many additional features exclusive to the Power BI (cloud) service described earlier in this chapter.