Tableau Server on Windows Help

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

• Minimum requirements for installation reflect the minimum hardware your computer must have in order to install Tableau Server. We do not recommend you attempt run Tableau Server on servers with these values, even if you are just testing. Depending the features you have licensed and are using, you may experience poor performance and an unrealistic experience. In certain cases Tableau Server may not start without at least 20GB of memory.

  For prototyping and Proof of Concept (PoC) testing, we recommend you use Tableau Cloud. This will give you an opportunity to experience Tableau Server on appropriately sized hardware.

• Minimum recommendations for production go beyond minimum installation requirements, and represent the minimum hardware configuration you should use for installation on most production nodes. If your computer meets the minimum installation requirements but does not meet these recommendations, the Setup program will warn you but you can continue the installation. For certain nodes dedicated to specific tasks and processes such as backgrounder, or Prep, you may be able to use servers that do not meet this minimum recommendation.

  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.

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, or on a VM instance that is using shared resources.

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

Minimum production hardware recommendations

For production use, the computers on which you install or upgrade Tableau Server should, in most cases, 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, as well as the features you have licensed. 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 installation process. For more information, see the Hardware recommendations for production installations.

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

<install directory>\ProgramData\Tableau\Tableau Server\logs\app-install.log

2020-11-24 17:40:43.842 +0000 main : DEBUG com.tableausoftware.tabadmin.configuration.builder.BootstrapConfigurationBuilder - System processor count = 8

2020-11-24 17:40:43.842 +0000 main : DEBUG com.tableausoftware.tabadmin.configuration.builder.BootstrapConfigurationBuilder - System memory = 64383MB