Business Intelligence enables SharePoint to serve as a portal for publishing Business Intelligence reports.
Excel Services is no longer included with SharePoint Server 2016, and it is a part of the Office Online Server. So, in order to take advantage of Excel services, you will need to set up a dedicated One or More Office Online servers.
There are three main components used to create and publish business intelligence reports in SharePoint 2016:
- Performance Point
- Power Pivot
- SQL Server Reporting Services.
Business Intelligence Architecture
Each BI component/ Module has their own requirements. For example, PowerPivot and Power View operate with a SQL Server 2016 Analysis Service instance, that means we need to install SSAS instance for PowerPivot.
SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services – SSRS service must run on a dedicated “Custom” role server on the SharePoint farm. MinRole are not coded to host SSRS, and the service will automatically be stopped if deployed on a Minroll server.
The Above chart describes a MinRole farm with four SharePoint Servers and one SQL Server for the databases.
To enable Excel Service functionality, we need to have our Office Online Server Farm configured with SharePoint.
We need to have our Custom server to run the SQL Server Reporting Services service, as well as the server running the SQL Server Analysis Services instance.
You can save a server by installing the SSAS and SSRS instance on the Custom server, but you need to scale up the resources (RAM and storage) as needed, the minimum is 4 cores and 16 GB of RAM.
Attention!
SharePoint Standard doesn’t support all BI Services, features such as PerformancePoint or PowerPivot are only available with the Enterprise version.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819267.aspx
We need to have our Custom server to run the SQL Server Reporting Services service, as well as the server running the SQL Server Analysis Services instance.
PowerPivot uses Silverlight, which is supported only by Internet Explorer.
SQL Server Reporting Services uses HTML5 which is supported by all browsers.
Ref:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/reference-architectures/sharepoint/