Last week on May 17th the Power BI team announced the release of the Power BI Report Server preview. Power BI Report Server includes the ability to host Power BI reports, along with traditional SQL Server Reporting Services content, within the boundaries of your organization’s firewall.

I put together the following video that captures me walking through the downloading, installation, and set up of the Power BI Report Server preview. This will allow you to get started with testing the functionality included with Power BI Report Server. Keep in mind that this is only a preview release so some of the functionality and capabilities could change prior to general availability.

How do you purchase Power BI Report Server once its generally available?

There are two ways to purchase Power BI Report Server.

1. Purchase Power BI Premium. By purchasing Power BI Premium, you also gain the rights to deploy Power BI Report Server on an equivalent number of cores on-premises in your organization’s environment.
2. Purchase SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance on the cores for which you wish to deploy Power BI Report Server.

How is Power BI Report Server different than SQL Server Reporting Services?

Power BI Report Server includes a superset of the features includes with SQL Server Reporting Services. This means that Power BI Report Server can do everything SQL Server Reporting Services can do. The difference between Power BI Report Server and SQL Server Reporting Services is that Power BI Report Server can host Power BI Report and render those reports within the browser, as seen below.

What data sources are supported for Power BI reports hosted in Power BI Report Server?

Initially, the Power BI Report Server preview will only support live query connections to SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular Models and Multidimensional cubes. The Power BI team has stated, however, that the number of supported data sources will continue to grow after the initial release.

Feedback and Thoughts?

I hope you found this helpful! Let me know what feedback you have or what your thoughts are on the release of the Power BI Report Server preview! Leave your comments down below.