Tableau Server on Windows Help

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.

• If you are new to Tableau Server, and you want to deploy it in your organisation, we encourage you to deploy Tableau Server as a single server in a test environment first. The easiest way to do a single-server installation is to follow the steps in Jump-start Installation.
• If you are deploying Tableau Server in a distributed cluster, review Distributed Requirements in addition to the requirements and recommendations described in this topic.

Validating your server deployment plan

Before you commit to installing a new Tableau Server deployment in your organisation, be sure to carefully evaluate your options. For most organisations, 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 organisation, 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 organisation. 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.

Important: The disk space requirement cannot be checked until you initialise TSM.

• 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.

• 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 64-bit Microsoft Windows Server operating systems are supported

	2019.x	2020.1.0 - 2021.2.x	2021.3.0 - 2023.1x, 2023.3.0	2023.3.1 - 2024.2.x
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows Server 2016
Windows Server 2019
Windows Server 2022	Note: Windows Server 2022 is not supported in versions prior to 2023.3.1. Beginning in April 2023, installers for all versions of Tableau Server on Windows prior to 2023.3.1 block installation on Windows 2022.

All nodes in a multi-node cluster must have the same type of operating system and the same major version of that operating system. For example, all Windows Server 2022 nodes .

You cannot install a multi-node instance of Tableau Server on a combination of Linux and Windows nodes.

Installation directory

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 licence. For more information on Tableau Prep Conductor licensing, see Licence Data Management.

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

• If you are installing a new Tableau Server, see Step 1 (New Install): Install Tableau Server with Tableau Prep Conductor.

• If you are adding Tableau Prep Conductor to an existing installation of Tableau Server, see Step 1 (Existing Install): Enable Tableau Prep Conductor.

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 \Windows\System32\Drivers\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 initialise 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.

If you are installing Tableau Server on a computer that's also running IIS (not a recommended deployment), you should modify the Tableau's gateway port number to avoid conflict with IIS. You can specify a different gateway port number during the setup process.

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.

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