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.

  • If you are new to Tableau Server, and you want to deploy it in your organization, 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 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.

  • 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 2023.3.1+
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

By default, Tableau Server will install on the system drive. The drive where Windows is installed is the system drive. In most cases, the system drive is the C:\ drive. In this default case, Tableau Server will install into the following directories:

  • C:\Program Files\Tableau\Tableau Server\packages

  • C:\ProgramData\Tableau\Tableau Server

Do not specify a symbolic link or a data directory location on a Network File System (NFS) volume.

Non-default installation locations

Rather than install onto the system drive, some organization install applications on a separate drive. During setup (or with automated installation), you can specify a different installation location. If you select a different installation drive or folder location during setup, then the data directory for Tableau Server will install into the same path. This means that if you install to a non-default location, the default C:\ProgramData\Tableau\Tableau Server path will not be created.

When you install to a non-default location, you must take the following into consideration:

  • You may need to configure Run As service account permissions manually. If you do not use the predefined local account, NetworkServices, as the Run As service account, then you will need to set permissions for the account that you will be using. You must set these permissions after you install Tableau Server. See Verify Folder Permissions.

  • Log files are stored at <installation path or drive>\data\tabsvc\logs. The C:\ProgramData\Tableau\Tableau Server\data\tabsvc\logs path in a default installation is converted to <installation path or drive>\data\tabsvc\logs.

  • You may need to specify the same location when you upgrade to newer versions of Tableau Server. For more information on upgrading, see Upgrade Tableau Server Overview.

    Note:If you run Tableau Server on a VM, either locally, or in the cloud, be aware of the potential for complications related to licensing. This applies whether you are running Tableau Server as a standalone or in a cluster. If you are simply upgrading Tableau Server on the VM, you do not need to take any extra action related to licensing. If you plan to clone the VM to create either a new production or test environment to upgrade, you need to deactivate any Tableau Server licenses before cloning. If you do not do this, the new VM environment can end up with an untrusted license, and any attempts to upgrade will fail.

    To clone a VM, make sure the Tableau Server is unlicensed (all licenses are deactivated). After cloning the VM, activate the Tableau license on the cloned VM and proceed with the upgrade.

  • When installing a multi-node instance of Tableau Server, the installation location (path) must be the same on every node.

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 \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 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.

If both IPv4 and IPv6 are enabled or multiple network cards (NICs) are being used, unexpected behavior can result. For more information, see the following:

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.

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

For information about configuring the local Windows firewall, refer to the Microsoft product documentation.

Local administrator

The account that you use to run Setup must be a member of the Local Administrators group on the Windows computer where Tableau Server is installed.

By default, you must also use an account with local administrator rights to run Tableau Services Manager (TSM) Web UI and CLI tools. However, after you have installed Tableau Server, you can specify a Windows group for TSM administration. See Configure a Custom TSM Administration Group.

Use TSM to configure the Tableau Server components that rely on OS-level access, such as processes, authentication, log files, licensing, and alerts. See TSM Authentication.

Tableau-specific administration, such as importing users, creating sites, web authoring, etc. is performed by Tableau Server administrators. You can configure these administrative accounts by assigning roles to users after you install. The initial Tableau Server administrator account is created as part of the installation process. See Add an Administrator Account.

Run As service account

A Run As service account for the Tableau Server service to run under is useful if you’re using NT Authentication with data sources or if you’re planning on doing SQL Server impersonation. For more information, see Run As Service Account and SQL Server Impersonation.

In some organizations, Group Policy or other system management solutions are used to standardize permissions and accounts on application servers. If your organization runs a such a solution, be sure to configure the system to accommodate the folder permissions required by the Run As service account. See Verify Folder Permissions.

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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