Before you install...


Note: You can find additional information about technical specifications for Tableau Server on the Tableau web site, here(Link opens in a new window).

This topic includes requirements and recommendations that you must consider before you install Tableau Server into a production environment.

Validating your server deployment plan

Before you commit to installing a new Tableau Server deployment in your organization, be sure to carefully evaluate your options. For most organizations, Tableau Cloud will provide a more reliable, performant, and cost-effective analytics solution when compared to self-hosting Tableau Server. For information about the viability of Tableau Cloud for your organization, review this blog post, Should I move my analytics to the cloud?(Link opens in a new window)

Already running Tableau Server and want to migrate to Tableau Cloud? See Tableau Cloud Manual Migration Guide(Link opens in a new window).

If you have determined that you must self-host Tableau Server, we recommend following the prescribed Tableau deployment in the Enterprise Deployment Guide(Link opens in a new window) (EDG). The EDG presents a fully-tested and supported, performant, scalable, secure reference architecture based on a tiered data network. Moving forward, we are committed to investing in the EDG reference architecture to ease feature rollouts and improve upgrade scenarios.

Hardware recommendations for production installations

The following list describes the minimum hardware recommendations for a production use, single- node installation of Tableau Server:

Important: These recommendations are minimums and may not reflect the requirements for your installation and organization. For example, there are a number of factors that can impact disk space requirements, including whether or not you will be publishing extracts, flows, and the number of workbooks to Tableau Server. For more information on what might impact free disk space requirements, see Disk Space Requirements.

Install Type

Processor

CPU

RAM

Free Disk Space

Single node
  • 64-bit (x86_64 chipsets)
  • Must support SSE4.2 and POPCNT instruction sets
  • ARM-based processors are not supported

8 cores (16 vCPUs), 2.0 GHz or higher

Version 2022.3 and later:

  • 128 GB

Version 2021.4.0 to version 2022.1.x:

  • 64 GB

Version 2021.3.x and earlier:

  • 32 GB

50 GB
If you are adding Tableau Prep Conductor to your Tableau Server installation, we recommend you add a second node and dedicate this to running Tableau Server Prep Conductor. This node should have a minimum of 4 cores (8 vCPUs), and 16 GB of RAM.

Multi-node and enterprise deployments

Contact Tableau for technical guidance.

Nodes must meet or exceed the minimum hardware recommendations, except:

  • Dedicated Backgrounder nodes running up to two instances of backgrounder, where 4 cores may be acceptable.

  • Dedicated node for Tableau Prep Conductor: Minimum of 4 cores (8 vCPUs), and 16 GB of RAM.

  • Dedicated node for Independent Gateway: Minimum of 2 cores (4 vCPUs), 8 GB of RAM, and 100 GB free disk space.

Important: The disk space requirement cannot be checked until you initialize TSM. If you don’t have enough space, you won’t be told this until after you install the Tableau Server package.

50 GB disk space available, with a minimum of 15 GB allocated to the /opt directory, and the remainder allocated to the /var directory for data storage.

  • Free disk space is calculated after the Tableau Server Setup program is unzipped. The Setup program uses about 1 GB of space. You may need to allocate additional disk space depending on various factors like whether you will be using extracts.

    The core Tableau Server bits must be installed in a directory with at least 15 GB of free disk space. If you attempt to install Tableau Server on a computer that does not have enough space, the Tableau Server package will install, but you will be unable to continue with setup. By default the install location is the /opt directory. You can change the installation path for Tableau Server on RHEL distros.

    If you plan to make heavy use of extracts then you may need to allocate additional disk space.You can specify a different directory for data (extract) storage during installation.

  • Network attached storage space requirements for External File Store: If you are planning to configure Tableau Server with External File Store, you will need to estimate the amount of storage space to dedicate on your network attached storage.

    Estimating the storage size: You must take into account the amount of storage needed for publishing and refreshing extracts. In addition, you must also take into account the repository backup size unless you specifically choose the option to do your repository backup separately as described in the Option 2: Back up repository separately topic.

    • Extracts:
      • Consider the number of extracts that will be published to Tableau Server and the size of each extract. Test your needs by publishing several extracts to Tableau Server, and then checking the disk space used. You can use this amount of disk space to help you figure out how many extracts will be published to Tableau Server over time as well as how each existing extract will increase in size.

      • Consider the space needed by the temp directory during an extract refresh. The temp directory, which is where an extract is stored to during a refresh, may require up to three times the final file size of the extract.

    • Repository Backup:

      • To obtain an estimate of the repository data, check the size of <data directory>/pgsql/data/base directory.

      • To obtain the exact size of the repository data, open the backup file and use the size of the workgroup.pg_dump file.

  • Core count is based on "physical" cores. Physical cores can represent actual server hardware or cores on a virtual machine (VM). Hyper-threading is ignored for the purposes of counting cores.

  • RAM shown is the minimum recommended for a single-node installation. Your installation may function better with more RAM, depending on activity, number of users, and background jobs, for example.

To see the full list of recommendations and to see the minimum requirements, see Minimum Hardware Requirements and Recommendations for Tableau Server. For hardware specifications Tableau uses internally for testing scalability, see Hardware recommendations for production installations.

For public cloud deployments on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, their “vCPU” is actually a CPU hyper-thread, and not a full CPU core. When sizing cloud instances, you will need twice as many vCPU as the Tableau Server CPU core requirements given (8 vCPU required for a minimum trial installation, 16 vCPU recommended for a single-node installation).

Operating system requirements

The following distributions of Linux are supported:

  2021.4.x 2022.1.0 -
2022.1.11		 2022.1.12+ 2022.3.0 -
2022.3.3		 2022.3.4+ 2023.1.0 -
2023.1.7		 2023.1.8+ 2023.3.0 2023.3.1 - 2024.2.x
AlmaLinux 8.x                
AlmaLinux 9.x                
Amazon Linux 2
Amazon Linux 2023                
CentOS 7.9+
(not 8.x)
CentOS Stream 8.x                
CentOS Stream 9.x                
Debian 9 Note: As of July 2022, Debian distributions are no longer supported. For more information, see this Tableau Community post(Link opens in a new window).
RHEL 7.3+
RHEL 8.3+
RHEL 9.x              
Oracle Linux 7.3+
(not 8.x)
Oracle Linux 8.x                
Oracle Linux 9.x                
Rocky Linux 8.x                
Rocky Linux 9.x                
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS      
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS              

For information about Linux distribution requirements for Tableau Server in a Container, see Supported distributions for building .

Important: To ensure you have the latest security and functionality patches, Tableau strongly recommends that you use the latest supported version of the Linux distribution you are deploying on. Tableau generally tests and validates on the latest minor version of a supported distribution major version.

Additional notes on Linux distributions:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Oracle Linux, and Amazon Linux distributions are collectively referred to in this documentation as RHEL-like.

  • As of July 2022, Debian distributions are no longer supported. For more information, see this Tableau Community post(Link opens in a new window).

  • Non-LTS releases of Ubuntu are not supported.

  • Ubuntu version 17.04 is not supported.

  • Ubuntu version 20.04 support was added in Tableau Server version 2023.1.0, and in Server maintenance releases 2022.1.12 and 2022.3.4. It is not supported in earlier versions.

  • Previous versions of CentOS and Ubuntu are not supported because Tableau Server requires systemd for process management.

  • The version of the installer with the file suffix, .deb, installs on both Ubuntu and Debian distributions.

  • Custom kernels are not supported.

In a multi-node installation of Tableau Server, all of the computer nodes where you are installing Tableau must run Linux and the same distribution of Linux.

Installation directory

The core Tableau Server bits are installed in the /opt directory by default.

  • The directory where you install Tableau Server must have at least 15 GB of free disk space allocated to it. If you attempt to install Tableau Server on a computer that does not have enough space, the Tableau Server package will install, but you will be unable to continue with setup.
  • You can specify a non-default install location on RHEL-like systems, but cannot change the location on Ubuntu.
  • Do not specify a symbolic link or a directory location on a Network File System (NFS) volume when specifying a non-default install location on RHEL-like systems.

Data directory

By default, Tableau Server will create a data directory for all content and extracts that are managed by Tableau. The directory is created at /var/opt/tableau/tableau_server.

You can specify a different directory for data (extract) storage during installation. If you plan to use a different directory, do not create the directory. Instead, let Tableau Server setup create the directory. The data directory requires specific permissions that are set during the installation process.

To change the data directory, you must pass a flag along with the data directory path when you run the initialize-tsm script. See Help Output for initialize-tsm Script.

If you are changing the default data directory:

  • Do not specify a symbolic link or a data directory location on a Network File System (NFS) volume.
  • Do not specify a data directory location with a path that includes a period or space. If there is a period or space in the path, initialization will fail.
  • The data directory must be installed into a different directory than the installation directory.

Important: You cannot change the data directory location after you've run initialize-tsm. The data directory location will persist for the life of the deployment, including subsequent upgrades.

Tableau Prep Conductor

Tableau Prep Conductor is one of the process on Tableau Server. It runs a flow, checks connection credentials, and sends alerts if a flow fails. Tableau Prep Conductor leverages the scheduling and tracking functionality of Tableau Server so you can automate running flows to update the flow output instead of logging into Tableau Prep Builder to manually run individual flows as your data changes.

Tableau Prep Conductor is licensed separately and is available through the Data Management license. For more information on Tableau Prep Conductor licensing, see License Data Management.

We recommend you enable Tableau Prep Conductor on a dedicated node. For more information:

Additional requirements

Make sure that your environment also meets the following additional requirements:

Hostname

  • Tableau Server must be able to resolve the hosthame to an IP address either using the domain name server (DNS) or with a local host file on the computer running Tableau Server. By default, host files are stored at /etc/hosts.
  • The hostname of the server must not change after you start Tableau Services Manager during the setup process. For example, this might happen if you use the cloud-init package to initialize a virtual machine, and you install Tableau Server on that virtual machine.
  • Hostnames that include underscores (_) are not supported by Tableau Server.

Static IP address

The computer where you install Tableau Server must have a static IPv4 or IPv6 address.

Database drivers

To connect to specific data sources, the computer where you install Tableau Server must have the correct database drivers installed. For more information, see Database Drivers.

Available ports

TSM and Tableau Server each require an available TCP port in order for you to access them. TSM defaults to port 8850, and the Tableau Server Gateway service defaults to port 80. We strongly recommend that you ensure that both port 8850 and 80 are not in use on your system before installing Tableau Server. If those ports are not available, the TSM and gateway ports may be dynamically remapped to different port numbers, and there is currently no interface for displaying which port they have been remapped to.

See Tableau Services Manager Ports.

Local firewall configuration

If you are running a firewall on the computer where you will be installing Tableau Server, then you will need to open the following default ports for Tableau Server traffic. All port numbers, except 443 can be changed.

Port TCP/UDP Used by ... TYPE OF INSTALLATION
All

Distributed / High Availability
80 TCP Gateway X  
443 TCP SSL. When Tableau Server is configured for SSL, the application server redirects requests to this port. Do not change this port. X  
8850 TCP Tableau Services Manager. X  
8060 TCP PostgreSQL database. X  
8061 TCP PostgreSQL backup verification port X  
8000-9000 TCP Range of ports reserved by default for dynamic mapping of Tableau processes   X
27000-27009 TCP Range of ports used by Tableau Server for License service. This range must be open on the node running the License service and accessible from other nodes. By default, the initial node runs the License service. X  

See Tableau Services Manager Ports and Configure Local Firewall.

System user and groups

Tableau Server on Linux uses one unprivileged user, and two groups for proper operation. Tableau will create the default account and groups during setup. Alternatively, you can specify existing accounts. See System user and groups

and TSM authorization group.

Sudo and root access

All installation tasks and administrative tasks for Tableau Server must be run as root. Often this is accomplished using the sudo command, but running the commands directly as the root user is also possible.

To install Tableau Server with the root account, you must specify a user account during installation. The account will be used for managing TSM. Specify the account by running the initialize-tsm script with the -a option. See Help Output for initialize-tsm Script.

Account password

The user account that you use to install and administer Tableau Server must be able to authenticate with a password. That is, the user must not use another means of authenticating (for example public key authentication).

If the account you are using to install and initialize Tableau Server does not have a password, you can set one using the passwd command:

                sudo passwd $USER

Port access requirements

If you want to install Tableau Server remotely, for example by means of SSH, ensure that the following ports are open:

  • 8850. The port used for the Tableau Services Manager (TSM) web interface. You can use this interface to configure Tableau Server.
  • 80. The port used for the main Tableau Server web interface.

The Tableau Server installer attempts to open these ports during the installation process, but it can only open these ports for the firewalld firewall. If your computer runs another firewall, you must open the ports before you install.

Virtual Container environments

Beginning with version 2021.2, certain configurations of Tableau Server on Linux can be run in a container. For details on supported configurations, see Tableau Server in a Container.

Previous versions of Tableau Server on Linux and unsupported configutations have not been tested and are not supported in virtual container environments such as Docker. In these cases, Tableau Server on Linux will not function as expected if installed in these environments.

Package requirements

Systemd

Tableau Server requires systemdto manage services. This package is installed by default on CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 16. If you decide to test Tableau Server on a modified version of these distributions, you can run the following command to confirm that systemd is installed:

                whereis systemd

If systemdis installed, the installation location is displayed. For example, you might see the following output:

                systemd: /usr/lib/systemd /etc/systemd /usr/share/systemd /usr/share/man/man1/systemd.1.gz

If you have systemd installed but the Tableau installer is failing requirements checks for systemd, it's likely that systemd is not running. To verify that systemd is running, run the following command:

ls /run/systemd

The output will be a list of files and directories. If systemd is running, the output will include system. If system is not in the output, then systemd is not running.

Antivirus software

Antivirus software that scans directories used by Tableau Server can interfere with installation and ongoing use of Tableau Server. In some cases, this can result in installation failures, problems starting Tableau Server, or impacts to performance. If you plan to run antivirus software on the computer running Tableau Server, follow the recommendations in the Knowledge Base(Link opens in a new window).

Continue to the next step: Install and Configure Tableau Server.

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