In this post, we will discuss the different options for On-Premises data Gateway high availability in Power BI.

To refresh On-Premises Data sources on Power BI Service, you need a Gateway. You can use an on-premises data gateway cluster to avoid single points of failure and distribute load across gateways in a cluster.

There are two types of high availability solutions for Power BI Gateway:

• Load balancing High Availability
• Failover High Availability

Load Balancing HA: Offline gateway within a cluster will impact performance negatively. So if a gateway is offline and you are using Load balancing, you should either remove or disable it because you are distributing the load among all active gateways in that cluster. If one gateway is offline in the cluster there will be performance issues.

To balance load across all active Gateways in the cluster, Check

” Distribute request across all active Gateways in the cluster” and click Apply.

To see if there are offline gateway in the cluster and how to remove them, use the following PowerShell script:

Get-OnPremisesDataGatewayClusters

Get-OnPremisesDataClusterGateways

Get-OnPremisesDataGatewayStatus

Remove-OnPremisesDataGateway

Failover HA: This is the default high availability solution for Power BI Gateway. The service always uses the primary gateway in the cluster and if the Primary gateway is offline, it will failover to the next available gateway that is online in that cluster. If one gateway is offline in a cluster, it will not impact performance, the service will just switch to the next available gateway in the cluster. The only issue with this is that all gateways in a cluster should be on the same version to avoid unexpected failures.

Happy administration 🙂