Minimum Hardware Requirements and Recommendations for Tableau Server

The following minimum hardware requirements and recommendations apply to all computers running Tableau Server, including physical hardware and virtual machines (VMs):

• Minimum requirements for testing and prototyping are the minimum hardware your computer must have in order to install Tableau Server. If your computer does not meet these requirements, the Setup program will not install Tableau Server. These requirements are appropriate for testing and prototyping, but are not appropriate for most production environments.

• Minimum recommendations for production go beyond minimum requirements, and represent the minimum hardware configuration you should use for a production installation of Tableau Server. If your computer meets the minimum requirements but does not meet these recommendations, the Setup program will warn you but you can continue the installation.

In addition, Tableau Server should not be installed on a physical computer or on a VM instance that is also running resource-intensive applications such as databases or application servers.

Note: If you install Tableau Server on a computer that meets the minimum requirements but does not have at least 8 cores and 16 GB of system memory, the default number of all processes installed is reduced to one of each process by design. For more information about processes, see Server Process Limits

Looking for Tableau Server on Windows? See Minimum Hardware Requirements and Recommendations for Tableau Server(Link opens in a new window).

Minimum Hardware Requirements for Testing and Prototyping

The computer on which you are installing or upgrading Tableau Server must meet the minimum hardware requirements. If the Setup program determines that your computer does not meet the following requirements, you will not be able to install Tableau Server.

These minimum requirements are appropriate for a computer that you use for prototyping and testing of Tableau Server. They apply to single-node installations and to each computer in a distributed installation.

Minimum Hardware Requirements	Processor	CPU	RAM	Free Disk Space
Note: These minimum requirements are not recommended for use in production environments. For production minimum recommendations, see Minimum Hardware Recommendations.	64-bit Must support SSE4.2 and POPCNT instruction sets ARM-based processors are not supported	4-core	16 GB	15 GB

• 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.

• 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.

Minimum Hardware Recommendations

For production use, the computer on which you install or upgrade Tableau Server should meet or exceed the minimum hardware recommendations. These recommendations are general. Actual system needs for Tableau Server installations can vary based on many factors, including number of users and the number and size of extracts. If the Setup program determines that your computer does not meet the following recommendations, you will get a warning, but you can continue with the setup process. The minimum recommendations listed here are intended as general guidance. However the recommendations for your environment may vary. For more information, see the Hardware recommendations section(Link opens in a new window) of the Recommended Baseline Configurations(Link opens in a new window) topic.

Install Type	Processor	CPU	RAM	Free Disk Space
Single node	64-bit Must support SSE4.2 and POPCNT instruction sets ARM-based processors are not supported	8-core, 2.0 GHz or higher	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: Nodes running backgrounder, where 4 cores may be acceptable. Dedicated node for Tableau Prep Conductor: Minimum of 4 cores (8 vCPUs), and 16 GB of RAM.

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: Backup 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.