Power BI On-Premises Data Gateway through a VM for customers

Question

I work in a small company and we develop Power BI dashboards for a few clients. Data sources tend to change with each client from MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, Excel etc. Most clients want to setup scheduled refreshes but in order to do that we need a Data Gateway. So far I have used my machine as a gateway but that requires my computer to be on all the time which is not ideal. Since our clients data is usually stored in their own networks I believe we need an enterprise data gateway to manage all those scheduled refreshes for our current and future projects.

We don't have any physical on prem infrastructure, most of the company's developements are managed through AWS linux cloud servers. From what I've read a possible solution is to have a VM running 24/7 with the enterprise data gateway installed, although this seems a bit expensive taking into consideration Azure VM prices. Is there any other solution to my situation or is a VM the only path I can take?

Answer 1

There isn't any other choice, To connect your data sources to PowerBI, you'll need to install and configure an on-premises data gateway, which requires an on-premises server or a virtual machine on Azure.

As you are aware, the machine setup that is suggested is:

A CPU with eight cores

Memory: 8 GB

Windows 8 64-bit or Windows Server 2012 R2 or later

Spooling storage on a solid-state disc (SSD).

If your resources are hosted in Azure, you can use the vnet data gateway, which doesn't require any setup.