Tableau Server on Windows Help
Minimum Hardware Requirements and Recommendations for Tableau Server
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
Minimum installation hardware requirements
We strongly recommend any Proof of Concept (PoC) testing or prototyping be done using Tableau Cloud. This guarantees you will be running on systems with adequate resources.
The computer on which you are installing or upgrading Tableau Server must meet the minimum hardware installation requirements. If the Setup program determines that your computer does not meet the following requirements, you will not be able to install Tableau Server. Meeting these requirements does not guarantee you a good experience testing Tableau Server
For more information on how the Setup program determines hardware, see Determining Computer Hardware.
Minimum Hardware Requirements
These minimum requirements are for installing Tableau Server. They do not guarantee successful testing or use. For production minimum recommendations, see Minimum production hardware recommendations.
Free Disk Space
- 64-bit ( x64 chipsets)
- Must support SSE4.2 and POPCNT instruction sets
- ARM-based processors are not supported
4 cores (8 vCPUs)
Version 2022.3 and later:
- 64 GB - initial node
- 16 GB - additional nodes
Version 2022.1 and earlier:
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Install Type
Free Disk Space
- 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:
Version 2021.4.0 to version 2022.1.x:
Version 2021.3.x and earlier:
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.
- To obtain an estimate of the repository data, check the size of /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.
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 hardware recommendations for Tableau Server in the cloud, see the following:
- Selecting an AWS Instance Type and Size (Link opens in a new window)
- Selecting a Google Compute Engine Virtual Machine Type and Size (Link opens in a new window)
- Selecting a Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Type and Size (Link opens in a new window)
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 app-install.log file in the following folder on the computer where you are installing Tableau Server:
\ProgramData\Tableau\Tableau Server\logs\app-install.log
In the app-install.log file, look for lines similar to the following. These lines provide information about the physical cores that the setup program detected and that it used to determine the core count that is being used for licensing, as well as the amount of system memory that was detected.
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
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.
- Open a command prompt.
- 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.
