Tableau Server on Windows Help

This is archived content

Deployments on public clouds continue to be supported but the content for third-party public cloud deployments is no longer updated.

For the latest Tableau Server deployment content, see the Enterprise Deployment Guide(Link opens in a new window) and the Deploy(Link opens in a new window) section of Tableau Server help.

For those customers who have access, we recommend Tableau Cloud. For more details, see:

• Tableau Cloud Manual Migration Guide
• Tableau Cloud Trial for Admin(Link opens in a new window)
• Tableau Cloud: Get Started for Admin(Link opens in a new window)

Introduction

For the most flexibility in security, scaling, and capacity, you can perform a self-deployment of Tableau Server on AWS. Building a cloud-based solution has many benefits over an on-premises installation. For example, the overall total cost of ownership for building a Tableau Server solution in the cloud is normally much less than a similar on-premises solution because you don’t have to buy all of the expensive hardware. In addition, the cloud can provide better uptime, reliability, and fault-tolerance, especially if you deploy your solution across different regions and Availability Zones.

When you deploy Tableau Server in a cluster in AWS, we recommend that you use Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes with Amazon EC2. EBS provides persistent block-level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. You should attach a separate EBS General Purpose (SSD) volume with a volume size of at least 100 GiB to allow room for installing Tableau Server. This volume size supports a baseline performance of 300 input/output operations per second (IOPS) with the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS. For more information, see General Purpose SSD (gp2) Volumes(Link opens in a new window) in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Windows Instances at the AWS website.

For heavy workloads where the storage subsystem must provide an absolute minimum number of IOPS for performance, you can either create a larger EBS General Purpose (SSD) volume to get up to 10,000 IOPS with the ratio of 3 IOPS per GiB, or use an EBS Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volume with the IOPS you need. In either case, we recommend that you use EBS-optimized instances if you plan to run heavy extracts and do a lot of data processing. For more information about Tableau Server performance, see Tableau Server Performance Overview.

Perform the following tasks to install and configure Tableau Server in the AWS cloud.

Step 1: Create a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Your first step is to create a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and add an Amazon elastic network interface(Link opens in a new window) to provide a static MAC address for your Amazon EC2 instance.

1. Sign in to AWS and then navigate to the Amazon VPC console(Link opens in a new window) (https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/)

2. Use the region selector to choose the location where your other AWS resources are located. Often, this is the region closest to you.

3. Under Resources, click Start VPC Wizard, on the Step 1: Select a VPC Configuration screen, click VPC with a Single Public Subnet, and then click Select.

4. On the Step 2: VPC with a Single Public Subnet screen, give your VPC a name, and then click Create VPC. You can leave all other settings at their default values.

Step 2: Configure networking and security

To allow inbound traffic to reach your VPC, you should limit traffic to three standard ports (HTTP, HTTPS, and RDP). For more information, see Recommended Network ACL Rules for your VPC in the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud User Guide at the AWS website.

1. Navigate to the Amazon EC2 console(Link opens in a new window) (https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/).

2. Use the region selector to choose the location where you created your VPC.

3. In the navigation pane, click Security Groups, and then click Create Security Group.

4. On the Create Security Group screen, in the Security group name field, enter a name for your security group.

5. In the Description field, enter a description for the security group.

6. In the VPC field, select your VPC from the list.

7. Click the Inbound tab, click Add Rule, and then in the Type list, select HTTP (80), and in the Source column, choose My IP for each rule. This limits inbound traffic to your computer. To specify an IP address range instead, choose Custom, and then enter the range in CIDR notation.

   For more information, see Adding Rules to a Security Group(Link opens in a new window) in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Windows Instances at the AWS website.

   Note: This port is required to receive incoming unencrypted web traffic.

8. Click Add Rule, in the Type list, select HTTPS (443), and in the Source column, choose My IP for each rule. This limits inbound traffic to your computer. To specify an IP address range instead, choose Custom, and then enter the range in CIDR notation.

   For more information, see Adding Rules to a Security Group(Link opens in a new window) in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Windows Instances at the AWS website.

   Note: This port is required to receive incoming encrypted web traffic.

9. Click Add Rule, in the Type list, select RDP (3389), and in the Source column, choose My IP for each rule. This limits inbound traffic to your computer. To specify an IP address range instead, choose Custom, and then enter the range in CIDR notation.

   For more information, see Adding Rules to a Security Group(Link opens in a new window) in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Windows Instances at the AWS website.

   Note: This port is required to accept Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) requests so that you can connect to the EC2 instance.

10. Click Create.

Step 3: Launch an Amazon EC2 instance

After you create your VPC, you can launch an Amazon EC2 instance into it.

For more information about how to launch and connect to a Windows instance, see Getting Started with Amazon EC2 Windows Instances(Link opens in a new window) in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Windows Instances at the AWS website.

1. Navigate to the Amazon EC2 console(Link opens in a new window) (https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/).

2. Use the region selector to choose the location where you created your VPC.

3. Under Create Instance, click Launch Instance.

4. Select an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that meets the system requirements for Tableau Server.

5. On the Step 2: Choose Instance Type screen, select the instance size you want (for example, m4.2xlarge).

   Note: For Tableau Server v10 on a 64-bit virtual machine, you need a minimum of 4 physical cores. On AWS, this means 8 vCPUs. For more information, see Amazon EC2 Instance Types(Link opens in a new window) at the AWS website.

6. Click Next: Configure Instance Details.

7. On the Step 3: Configure Instance Details screen, in the Network list, select your VPC.

8. Click through the steps in the wizard until you get to Step 6: Configure Security Group.

9. On the Step 6: Configure Security Group screen, click Select an existing security group, and then select the security group that you created earlier.

10. Click Review and Launch, review your configuration, and then click Launch.

11. When you are prompted, create a new key pair, download it as a .pem file, and keep it in a safe place. You need the key pair in order to create a password that you can use to log into the Amazon EC2 instance.

12. When you have finished creating and downloading your key pair, click Launch Instances.

13. Click View Instances and locate your instance in the list.

14. Copy the instance ID. You’ll need this in the next step.

Step 4: Create an elastic IP address for the VPC

After you launch your Amazon EC2 instance, you can create and allocate a static public IP address to your VPC.

1. Navigate to the Amazon VPC console(Link opens in a new window) (https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/).

2. Use the region selector to choose the location where you created your VPC.

3. In the navigation pane, click Elastic IPs.

4. Click Allocate new address, and then click Allocate.

5. In the New address request succeeded dialog box, click the Elastic IP address.

6. On the Action menu, click Associate address.

7. In Resource type, select Instance.

8. In the Instance drop-down list box, select your instance, and then click Associate.

9. Copy the new private IP address. You’ll need this later.

Step 5: Log in to Amazon EC2

To run Tableau Server on AWS, you install it on the Amazon EC2 instance or instances that you just configured. To begin, you log into the Amazon EC2 instance where you want to install Tableau Server.

Step 6: Install Tableau Server

If you want to run a Tableau Server cluster, install additional Tableau Servers on additional Amazon EC2 instances. For more information, see Self-Deploy Tableau Server on AWS in a Distributed Environment.