Automate your migration to Microsoft Fabric capacities
Earlier this year, we announced that we are consolidating purchase options and retiring the Power BI Premium per capacity SKUs (P-SKUs). The Power BI Premium product capabilities aren’t changing and there is no immediate action required for most customers. You can continue using your existing Power BI Premium capacity until the time of your next renewal.
After February 1st, 2025, customers with expiring Enterprise Agreements (EA) or Microsoft Cloud Agreements will no longer be able to add or purchase Power BI Premium capacity through their agreement. Existing Power BI Premium capacity customers should work with their Microsoft account representative to transition to a suitable Fabric capacity and pricing plan ahead of their next renewal, which provides more flexibility in SKU size, pay-as-you-go billing options, access to Azure-only features, and is eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC).
As you transition, you can select either pay-as-you-go pricing or reservation pricing. Reservation pricing for Fabric allows you to pre-commit Fabric Capacity Units in one-year increments, helping you save up to 40.5% over the Fabric pay-as-you-go prices. This reservation also provides more flexibility in SKU size, allowing the reservation discount to apply to other capacities within the same scope. Read our licensing documentation to learn more about how to purchase Fabric capacity reservations.
For more information on this announcement and the benefits of Fabric capacity (F-SKUs), please read the Important update coming to Power BI Premium licensing blog.
Microsoft Fabric
See how the role-specific workloads within Fabric can help everyone in your organization manage, interpret, and act on data and insights.
Migrating to Microsoft Fabric capacity
As part of this retirement, you will need to migrate from your existing Power BI Premium capacity to a new Fabric capacity. You have 90 days to access your BI items and data in Power BI your existing Power BI Premium capacity after suspending payment, so you don’t have to fear losing access to your work or paying for both capacities at the same time. After the 90 days, your workspaces will be automatically downgraded to Power BI Pro workspaces. The migration itself is simple—all you need to do is reassign your workspaces to the new Fabric capacity. However, many of you have tenants that span thousands or even hundreds of thousands of workspaces, making manual migration a challenge.
This blog will cover the different options you have when considering how you want to migrate your items between Power BI and Fabric capacities. First, we will cover how to migrate manually and then we’ll show how our new automated migration tool can help you accelerate the process.
Manual migration
You can reassign workspaces to the new Fabric capacity(s) individually from each workspace or by bulk assigning them in the admin portal.
- Individually reassigning: You can assign a workspace to a new capacity from the settings of that workspace. To move a workspace into a capacity, you must have admin permissions to that workspace, and capacity assignment permissions to that capacity.
- Bulk assigning in the admin portal: Admins, when managing a capacity in the admin portal, can see Workspaces assigned to this capacity section that allows you to assign workspaces. There are three options:
- Workspaces by users: When you assign workspaces by user or group, all the workspaces that the user or group is admin of become part of the Premium capacity, including the user’s personal workspace.
- Specific workspaces: You can enter the name of a specific workspace to assign to the selected capacity.
- The entire organization’s workspaces: You can also assign all workspaces and “My Workspaces” in an organization to a specific capacity. All users will then have permission to reassign individual workspaces to this capacity.
- Once the workspaces are reassigned, all currently active jobs will be canceled and will need to be rerun. Scheduled jobs that are not currently active will resume their schedules once the migration is complete.
- Once fully migrated, please delete your old Power BI Premium capacities.
Please note, that if your workspaces contain Fabric artifacts, they cannot be reassigned to capacities located in a different geography. If you have a small amount or no Fabric artifacts in your environment, you can disable Fabric features as you migrate your workspaces to accelerate the process. Learn how here.
Also note, that if you’ve created a large semantic model in a workspace, it must stay in that region. You cannot reassign a workspace with a large semantic model to a capacity in another region.
If you want step-by-step instructions with screenshots on how to migrate, please download our migration guide.
Automated P-SKU to F-SKU migration tool
Many customers have hundreds or thousands of workspaces in their Power BI Premium capacities. For these customers, we have created an automated migration tool that can help you programmatically migrate using Fabric REST APIs. This Fabric notebook will automatically create pay-as-you-go F SKUs for each capacity you select and make sure that F SKU is in the same region, has equivalent capacity, includes the same admins, and migrates all workspaces. You will have to manually transfer your capacity settings such as disaster recovery, notifications and any delegated tenant settings that have been overridden at the capacity level. These settings can be accessed via the Capacity Admin section of the Fabric Admin portal. And if you want a reserved instance, you will need to set that up yourself before using the tool. With that in mind, we recognize that you might be at different points of the journey and the notebook can help with several scenarios including:
- F-SKU creation: If your F-SKU has not yet been created, it will create the F SKU first and then complete the rest of the process. If you already have an F-SKU(s), it will skip the creation and complete the rest of the process.
- Migrating multiple capacities: You can migrate a single capacity, a list of capacities, or all of your capacities.
- Migrating trial capacities: You can migrate Fabric trial capacities to paid Fabric capacities.
Check out the following demo to see how it works:
If you want to try out this tool for yourself, you can access the tool on the Semantic Link Labs GitHub here.
Semantic Link Labs also has other capabilities which can help you automate and simplify many technical processes in Fabric. These tools can help you with scenarios for migrating import and DirectQuery semantic models to Direct Lake, model best practice analyzer, Vertipaq Analyzer, and over 300 other functions. You can even create, update, suspend, or resume your Fabric capacities.
Frequently asked questions
Should I plan for downtime during the workspace migration process?
Yes, you should plan for migration to take place when users and jobs are not active to reduce potential failures.
Will I have to migrate reports and data when I switch from P-SKUs to F-SKUs?
You will just have to reassign your workspaces to the new Fabric capacity. Read the step-by-step guidance above for more information.
What will happen to my Power BI and Fabric artifacts once I cancel my Power BI Premium capacity and purchase F-SKU capacity?
You will be able to access your Fabric artifacts for 90 days after P-SKU capacity subscription has ended. During these 90 days, you can migrate your workspaces to your new F-SKU capacity without fear of losing access to your existing work. However, once the workspace is reassigned, all currently active jobs will be canceled. Rerun those jobs after migration. Migration doesn’t impact scheduled jobs.
Will I have to pay for both P-SKU and F-SKU as I transition?
No. If a Premium subscription expires, you have 90 days to access your data. During this time, you will be able to migrate your workspaces to your new F-SKU capacity without losing access to your existing work. Once you’ve migrated your data, you should delete your Power BI Premium capacities that are no longer in use.
Does the Power BI Pro per user and Power BI Premium per user license requirement for Power BI Premium per capacity also extend to Fabric capacity?
Power BI report authors and consumers of workspaces that are not in a Fabric capacity will still need a Power BI Pro Per User or their Power BI Premium Per User licenses. However, with an Fabric 64 SKU (F64)—a Premium P1 equivalent—or larger capacities, report viewers can view content with only a Microsoft Fabric free license if the content is hosted in the capacity. For non-Power BI activities, no Power BI Pro license is required. This means users can use pipelines, create data warehouses, use notebooks, and manage their capacities without a Power BI Pro license.
Can I move a workspace from one capacity to a capacity in a different region?
You won’t be able to move a Power BI workspace to a new region if it has Fabric items in it. E.g., Fabric Pipelines, Fabric Shortcuts, or Fabric ML, etc. If you move or delete these Fabric items first, you can then proceed with moving the workspace to another capacity in a different region. Additionally, if you have large data format enabled, you will need to convert those to small data format before transitioning to a new region.
What are the benefits of Fabric capacity?
Customers who migrate their Power BI Premium capacity subscription to Fabric capacity will enjoy a range of additional benefits. Fabric capacity is eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) which means Fabric customers can apply their Fabric spend against their MACC commitment. There is also a pay-as-you-go option for Fabric which enables you to dynamically scale up or scale down and pause capacity as needed. Fabric capacity customers can also take advantage of smaller compute SKUs that start far below the entry-level Power BI Premium SKU.
Additionally, Fabric capacity customers will get access to Azure-only features like trusted workspace access and Managed Private Endpoints for Spark. These features are native to Azure and not available to Power BI Premium capacity customers. See all Microsoft Fabric SKUs available in your Azure region on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page.
Can I turn off all of Microsoft Fabric or some of the Fabric workloads?
To disable Microsoft Fabric, you can turn off the Microsoft Fabric admin switch. After disabling Microsoft Fabric, users will have view-only permissions for Microsoft Fabric items. If you disable Microsoft Fabric for a specific capacity while Microsoft Fabric is available in your organization, your selection will only affect that capacity.
If I have both Power BI Premium and Fabric capacity, how does that impact my experience?
If you have Power BI Premium capacity on your agreement, multiple capacities may be provisioned by different users within the same tenant including both P-SKUs and F-SKUs. This allows capacities to be purchased and managed separately by different business units, each powering their own projects and creators, thus allowing easy cost management and control. It also means, your experience won’t be impacted if you’ve purchased both F-SKUs and P-SKUs. Note, all agreements that expire after February 1st, 2025 will no longer be able to purchase Power BI Premium capacity.
Once the Fabric capacity is activated, will the existing Power BI reports and dashboards run the same way as they did in the Power Premium capacity?
Once the dashboards are in a workspace assigned to a Fabric capacity with equivalent capability to the Power BI Premium capacity they were in (e.g., P1 equivalent to an F64), they should behave the same way. If you have any specific concerns, you should confirm through testing.
