As described in the Data governance for Power BI section of Chapter 12, Administering Power BI for an Organization, certain projects will likely be wholly owned by the BI/IT team including the report and visualization layer. Other projects, however, may be owned by business units or teams but still require or benefit from IT-provided resources such as the On-premises data gateway and premium capacity. The BI department can manage a continuous life cycle over both project types (Corporate BI, Self-Service BI) by validating use cases or requirements for premium capacity. Additionally, the migration of Power BI content across distinct premium capacities could become part of a standard migration process from a self-service solution to a corporate BI owned solution.
The provisioning and allocation of Power BI Premium capacity can further reflect an organization's support for both Corporate and Self-Service BI solutions. Typically the Power BI content created and managed by IT is considered mission critical to the organization or is accessed by a high volume of users. Self-service BI solutions, however, tend to utilize smaller datasets and usually need to be accessible to a smaller group of users.
The following example allocation includes two premium capacities, a P3, and a P2, dedicated to Corporate BI Capacity and Self-Service BI Capacity content, respectively:
As shown in the diagram the sales, and a finance app workspace have been assigned to a P3 capacity dedicated to corporate BI solutions. As described in the Premium capacity nodes section earlier, a P3 capacity is currently the largest premium capacity available with 32 v-cores. These additional resources and limits, such as a max of 120 DirectQuery or Live connection queries per second, may be required to support organization-wide usage and an optimal user experience.
The Human Resources and Purchasing workspaces, however, have been assigned to a P2 Premium capacity dedicated to self-service BI projects. For example, certain Power BI Pro users in these departments have developed datasets and reports that have proven to be valuable to several stakeholders. The assignment of these workspaces to premium capacity enables these users to make this content accessible to a wider audience, such as the 20 Power BI Free users in the Purchasing department.
In the event that one of the self-service solutions needs to be migrated to the corporate BI team, the BI team could re-assign the workspace to the existing P3 capacity. Alternatively, to avoid consuming any additional resources of the existing P3 capacity and potentially impacting these workloads, a new corporate BI capacity could be created for the workspace.
BI teams will consistently need to evaluate the trade-offs involved with isolating projects/solutions to specific premium capacities. Assigning a single workspace or multiple related workspaces to a dedicated capacity ensures that no other project or activity will impact performance. However, many dedicated premium capacities may become onerous to manage and could be an inefficient use of resources if the Power BI workload doesn't fully utilize the resources. Ultimately, teams will need to monitor capacity resource utilization and either re-allocate and re-assign capacities and workspaces, respectively, or provision additional premium resources (v-cores) and scale up existing capacities.