The following minimum hardware requirements and recommendations apply to all computers running Tableau Server, including physical hardware and virtual machines (VMs):
- Iramdisk 3 6 8 – Create A Ram Disk Hard Drive
- Iramdisk 3 6 8 – Create A Ram Disk Drives
- Iramdisk 3 6 8 – Create A Ram Disk Drive
- Iramdisk 3 6 8 – Create A Ram Disk Recovery
At the border between each range listed in Table 15.1, “Recommended System Swap Space”, for example a system with 2 GB, 8 GB, or 64 GB of system RAM, discretion can be exercised with regard to chosen swap space and hibernation support. If your system resources allow for it, increasing the swap space may lead to better performance. Of course, you can’t use all of the RAM to create virtual memory, but you can use a significant part of it depending upon your RAM’s capacity. Why to create RAMDisk using these RAMDisk software? RAM is way faster than the Hard Disk Drives available on our computers. It is up to 100 times faster than SSD and 200 times faster than Hard Drives.
- Minimum requirements for testing and prototyping are the minimum hardware your computer must have in order to install Tableau Server. If your computer does not meet these requirements, the Setup program will not install Tableau Server. These requirements are appropriate for testing and prototyping, but are not appropriate for most production environments.
- Minimum recommendations for production go beyond minimum requirements, and represent the minimum hardware configuration you should use for a production installation of Tableau Server. If your computer meets the minimum requirements but does not meet these recommendations, the Setup program will warn you but you can continue the installation.
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.
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 Hardware Requirements for Testing and Prototyping
The computer on which you are installing or upgrading Tableau Server must meet the minimum hardware requirements. If the Setup program determines that your computer does not meet the following requirements, you will not be able to install Tableau Server.
For more information on how the Setup program determines hardware, see Determining Computer Hardware.
These minimum requirements are appropriate for a computer that you use for prototyping and testing of Tableau Server. They apply to single-node installations and to each computer in a distributed installation.
Minimum Hardware Requirements | Processor | CPU | RAM | Free Disk Space |
---|---|---|---|---|
Note: These minimum requirements are not recommended for use in production environments. For production minimum recommendations, see Minimum Hardware Recommendations. | 64-bit ARM-based processors are not supported | 4-core | 16 GB | 15 GB |
- 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 Hardware Recommendations
For production use, the computer on which you install or 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 ARM-based processors are not supported | 8-core, 2.0 GHz or higher | 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:
|
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.
- 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.
![Recovery Recovery](https://static.macupdate.com/screenshots/213843/m/iramdisk-screenshot.png?v=1568284277)
For hardware recommendations for Tableau Server in the cloud, see the following:
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: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.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.
Iramdisk 3 6 8 – Create A Ram Disk Hard Drive
- 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.
What is a RAMDisk?
A RAMDisk is a virtual drive that uses RAM to store information. This can be thought of as the RAM pretending to be an incredibly fast hard drive so you can install non-volatile games/programs on it or make it a scratch disk.
In the simplest of terms, a RAMDisk is RAM in a hard drive costume. The RAM is still volatile, but builds and maintains an index throughout user-defined intervals in use; it will write to an index on non-volatile storage to keep data permanently.
To put things into perspective: 1866MHz RAM has a peak data rate of approximately 15GB/s, so even matched against the world’s fastest consumer-class SSD (or enterprise-class, for that matter), RAM will far-and-away outperform it.
Advantages/disadvantages of a RAMDisk
A RAMDisk offers quite a few unique advantages and disadvantages. The largest advantage to a RAMDisk is the 100-150x transfer speed boost over HDDs and even ~25x over SSDs (goodbye loading screens!). Because RAM does not wear noticeably from I/O like regular drives do, it can be helpful to people who want to boost performance by using it in a read/write intensive situation, like as a scratch disk for Photoshop or Premiere.
But RAMDisks are not without their fair share of disadvantages. The most immediate is decreasing the amount of available RAM to the host system; further, in the event of power loss, data on the RAMDisk that has not been backed-up will be lost in shut-down. RAMDisks can also drastically increase shutdown time if you are saving to an image on an HDD or SSD for permanent storage; if you’re loading that image on startup, it can drastically increase boot time.
These advantages and disadvantages should be taken into consideration before creating a RAMDisk. Some disadvantages can be mitigated through creative implementation and careful indexing, but they’re still present.
Unique Software Implementations
Different RAMDisk software takes different creative approaches toward the disadvantages of RAMDisks to try mitigate them as much as possible. One of these techniques is saving to an image so the user can retain data stored on the RAMDisk at shutdown. This is a fairly simple concept and some software even allows for auto-saving every “X” minutes (X is set by the user). But some software, like AMD’s RAMDisk, takes this a step further and keeps a running tab (record) of what is on the image; AMD’s RAMDisk then analyzes what, if anything, has changed and will only rewrite changes while leaving static data untouched. This leads to less wear on host drives and shutdowns taking much less time.
Another approach is featured by Imdisk, yet another RAMDisk solution. Imdisk uses dynamic RAMDisk scaling; in dynamic RAMDisk scaling, the user sets the max capacity limit for the RAMDisk, then as the user puts more or less data onto the RAMDisk, it’ll change the amount of RAM reserved. More RAM is accessible if your RAMDisk is empty, less if it is filling up.
NUMA can be useful for large server arrays, but for the majority of RAMDisk users, it will be completely irrelevant.
Who can best use RAMDisks?
RAMDisks are not usually for the average user. They appeal more to power users who want them for specific uses. Gamers with lots of RAM can benefit from the much lower loading times, users doing I/O-intensive tasks can also benefit from using a RAMDisk for quick retrieval of data or a scratch-disk, but outside of this, most users don’t need or want a RAMDisk.
We’ve got a series of RAMDisk benchmarks coming up in our next article on this topic, but as a bit of a spoiler, we’ve seen load times decrease as much as 2x-3x in games like PlanetSide 2 when using a RAMDisk.
Even if a user doesn’t have a purpose for a RAMDisk, I still suggest playing around with them just to learn about the process.
How to Create & Install a RAMDisk
You don't need to understand any complicated programming or scripting to create a RAMDisk, with thanks to programs like AMD RAMDisk, SoftPerfect RAM Disk, ImDisk, and many others. Creating a RAMDisk has become something quite simple and user-friendly.
Iramdisk 3 6 8 – Create A Ram Disk Drives
To create a RAMDisk, you need to first download and install RAMDisk software. In this walkthrough, we will be using SoftPerfect RAM Disk since it’s free, fairly easy to use, and is my personal favorite. In this tutorial we will show how to make a RAMDisk that starts on boot-up and saves to an image.
First, in SoftPerfect RAM Disk, go to image at the top and then select “Create Image.”
Type your image name, define where it will be stored, and set its size in MB. I generally don’t change the image type or file system.
Click “Disk” at the top after creating the image. Select “Add Boot Disk” and in this menu choose the image you just made (your RAMDisk will be the size of the image automatically), the drive letter, and make sure to check “Save Contents to Image” so you don’t lose any data you place on your RAMDisk.
Clicking “advanced” brings up a number of options. Most users need not worry about many of them except the option to save the contents of the RAMDisk to an image every x minutes. This will ensure there is no data loss in the event of a power surge.
For servers, NUMA may be be useful, but for the majority of users it won’t be and can be ignored. Now simply click “OK” out of those two windows and your RAMDisk is made! Navigate to “Tools” and then “Settings” to check that SoftPerfect RAMDisk is set to launch automatically with Windows so it’ll automatically load on boot. You can now install programs on your RAMDisk and use it however you see fit. I personally find that file-intensive games like Planetside 2 benefit greatly from being on a RAMDisk.
Iramdisk 3 6 8 – Create A Ram Disk Drive
Our next article on RAMDisks will include benchmarks for RAMDisks and how they affect performance.
Iramdisk 3 6 8 – Create A Ram Disk Recovery
- Michael “The Bear” Kerns.