Tableau Server on Windows Help

For production use, the computer on which you 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 (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.

Determining Computer Hardware

To determine how many physical cores a computer has, the Tableau Server setup program queries the operating system. To view hardware information that the setup program detected on your computer, open the tabadmin.log file in the following folder on the computer where you are installing Tableau Server:

<install directory>\ProgramData\Tableau\Tableau Server\logs\tabadmin.log

In the tabadmin.log file, look for lines similar to the following. These lines provide information about the physical and logical cores that the setup program detected and that it used to determine the core count that is being used for licensing.

2015-04-09 14:22:29.533 -0700_DEBUG_10.36.2.32:<machine name>_:_pid=21488_0x2cd83560__user=__request=__ Running hardware check

2015-04-09 14:22:29.713 -0700_DEBUG_10.36.2.32:<machine name>_:_pid=21488_0x2cd83560__user=__request=__ Detected 12 cores and 34281857024 bytes of memory

2015-04-09 14:22:29.716 -0700_DEBUG_10.36.2.32:<machine name>_:_pid=21488_0x2cd83560__user=__request=__ Hardware meets recommended specifications. Default values will be used.

Manually determining the number of cores on your computer

To determine manually how many physical cores your server has, you can use the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line tool (WMIC). This is useful if you do not know whether your computer will meet the minimum hardware requirements for installing Tableau Server.

1. Open a command prompt.

2. Enter the following command:

   WMIC CPU Get DeviceID,NumberOfCores

   The output will display the device ID or IDs and the number of physical cores the computer has.

   

   In this example, there are two CPUs, each with six cores, for a total of twelve physical cores. This computer would satisfy the minimum hardware requirements for installing Tableau Server.

   The following command shows a longer version that lists the logical processors as well as the physical cores.

   WMIC CPU Get DeviceID,NumberOfCores,NumberOfLogicalProcessors,SocketDesignation

   

   In the above example, the server has a total of twelve physical cores, resulting in 24 logical cores.

Continue to Server Upgrade - Review What's Changed.