VM Tuning & Best Practices

Loic Grange, Principal Architect

John Kuo, Technical Account Manager
First Thing First
Tableau minimum requirements and recommendations assume bare metal physical
servers, NOT VMs.
Scalability testing assumes bare metal physical servers as well.
Dedicated Resources Required
Tableau Server is resource-intensive and latency-sensitive due to its interactive nature
Dedicated Resources Required
Dedicated vCPU
100% dedicated vCPU allocation should not be pooled or shared.
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.
Dedicated RAM
Fully (100%) pre-allocated, no pooling or sharing, no dynamic RAM.
Contiguous on the host server.
Disk
Write speed is often the bottle neck, faster the better!
150MB/s or less = BAD
250MB/s+ WRITE = GOOD
400MB/s to 1GB/s+ = GREAT
250MB/s Write & 1GB/s Read = Good performance
Tiered SAN: Tableau should be on higher tier with better IO than typical storage level tier.
No underlying network attached storage (NAS) for disk.
Poorly tuned VMs Poor performance Wasted $$ on core purchases
Backup & Restore
Theres one and only one Tableau supported way to create a Tableau Server backup
From http://kb.tableau.com/articles/knowledgebase/server-maintenance
Important: You can only use backups made with the tabadmin backup command when restoring Tableau Server data.
Database backups made in other ways, and virtual machine snapshots are not valid sources for restoring Tableau
Server.
Other ways may or may not work. Tableau cannot provide help or support.
DEFINITELY NOT SUPPORTED
VMotion
Breaks Tableaus underlying licensing technology
Assign Tableau to static/dedicated hosts instead
VM Snapshot
VM Tuning Tips Directly From VMWare
Performance Best Practices for vSphere 5.5
(http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.5.pdf)
See page 17 for recommended BIOS setting
Deploying Extremely Latency-Sensitive Applications in vSphere 5.5
(http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/latency-sensitive-perf-vsphere55.pdf)
See page 15 for best practices for latency-sensitive applications
Upgrade network adapter driver in VM cluster
From a VMWare Technical Account Manager:
What I recommend to my other customers besides what is spelled out in the first guide is to set Power Management to Max
Performance and to disable C1E States and C-States. This ensures that the server hardware is always running at its
maximum performance capabilities. That way no matter what application comes your way, you are getting the most out of
the iron. From my perspective you never know what type of apps you are being asked to support in a virtual environment. You
are just getting requests for VMs with certain characteristics, CPUs, RAM, etc You are not being told, this application is
sensitive to latency, or has high I/O characteristics. Usually you get this info after there is a problem. By performing the above
steps, you may still have to tweak some VM settings, but you will not have to tweak the underlying iron.
Other Considerations
Virus Scan can impact performance
Improve Performance by using antivirus exclusions
Network latency between worker machines should be less than 10ms.
Single network hop between servers (contiguous network access).
Tableau can advise VM best practices but cannot help with actual configuration. Please contact
your VM vendor for assistance.