Power BI Premium consists of dedicated capacity (hardware) that an organization can provision to host some or all of its Power BI content (datasets, reports, and dashboards). As an alternative to the free clusters of capacity provided by Microsoft and shared by many organizations, premium capacities are isolated to a specific organization and thus are not impacted by the use of Power BI by other organizations. Another very important benefit of this isolation is that the provisioning organization can utilize their capacity as needed and is not constrained by the limits imposed on shared (free) capacity, such as dataset sizes and refresh frequencies. Additionally, as a cloud service managed by Microsoft, organizations have great flexibility to scale, allocate, and manage premium resources according to their preferred allocation methodology and changing requirements. 

The top benefit of Power BI Premium is the ability to provide read-only access to Power BI Free users and thus cost-effectively scale Power BI deployments based on workloads rather than individual user accounts. This is particularly essential for large organizations with thousands of users, the majority of which only need the ability to view and optionally interact with content. If Power BI content is hosted in a premium capacity, the users consuming content such as via Power BI apps can view and interact with the content, such as making filter selections on a report or viewing a mobile-optimized dashboard on Power BI mobile applications. Power BI Premium enables organizations to limit the assignment of Power BI Pro users to those who will create and distribute content and to focus on provisioning and allocating premium resources according to the use cases and needs of workloads within the organization.

Additionally, Power BI Premium capacity can be used to deliver Power BI content to users in applications and environments outside of the Power BI service. For example, premium capacity can be used to embed Power BI visuals in custom applications, in other SaaS applications such as SharePoint Online, and can be used to license the Power BI Report Server. Details regarding the Power BI Report Server and alternative content distribution methods are included in Chapter 10, Deploying the Power BI Report Server, and Chapter 11, Creating Power BI Apps and Content Distribution, respectively.

The premium capacity-based licensing model, which currently starts at $5,000 per month for a P1 SKU, implies the following three fundamental questions:

1. How much premium capacity should be provisioned?
2. How should provisioned capacity be allocated? 
3. What can be done to minimize capacity utilization and thus resource costs?

Guidance and consideration of these questions are included in the following sections.