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How to Upgrade Tableau Server Steps and Best Practices
A Way to Upgrade Tableau Server v8 through v10. Also, the method to Restore Tableau Server below.
SCRUM/AGILE — Try not to become a proxy between the groups, and understand outage and impacts before diving into this process.
Always have a scrum planning session with architects, product owners on the tech side, and the product owners for both the business and technology need to be present.
It won’t hurt to whiteboard this process, discuss where backups will live while the installation/upgrade/restore is happening.
Always have a scrum planning session with architects, product owners on the tech side, and the product owners for both the business and technology need to be present.
It won’t hurt to whiteboard this process, discuss where backups will live while the installation/upgrade/restore is happening.
If possible: When in doubt. Do a fresh installation on a fresh VM.
Do this upgrade/restore on a test environment with your backups. Make sure you understand environment variables, right click run as admin, and all those usual steps when working on a complex environment. The number one error I see is there is very little documentation around what the SA has proliferated on permissions for folders, create, read, view, etc… Make sure you’re logging in with the SA login and if something isn’t acting the way it should, it generally always falls back to an undocumented permission layer. The installer needs to run with the sysadmin or SA logged in to the box, this opens a lot of permissions that will generally be turned off in most modern enterprise environments.
Consultants: Always ask up front if they know that their user account is a SA, and you can go as far as asking them to show you their permissions.
You might be wondering why I’m giving you these steps — it’s because this is where I see most of the time spent troubleshooting. Before you leave this workload, be sure you’re documenting as you go, take screenshots, write down the steps it takes. Especially if you’re not on the core box. Also, have fun, keep this in the dev environment if possible.
How to double check account permission: (consultants, ask them to show you their permissions — this isn’t a negative, people will appreciate your diligence.)
- Go to the Start menu (in the lower left corner of your Windows desktop).
- Click Settings > Control Panel or Control Panel, depending on which version of Windows you have.
- Open User Accounts.
- Click the Users tab.
These are safety tips and explaining best practices and uphill battles in our experience.
This is little video explaining blimp view of what most do not catch! Also my son, Andoni.
Have you backed up Tableau Server yet? This is a good time to ask that question, or a good time to back it up.
Quick warning Before upgrading Tableau Server
Some of these moves can cause an outage — and should be a team event for any major business. Work with senior staff before trying to backup a massive file.
If you have a lot of ‘executive’ decision makers, and they need the Server instance — do not do this during peak hours, work with change managers, outage management, environment managers, (there are a lot more terms I can throw at you here, so just get prepared for an outage unless your network/sys admin is available, this is possible with zero downtime. Will explain on the bottom.)
Personal note: I installed Tableau Server on my personal computers hundreds of times before generating this document.
There are lots of versions of Tableau Server running in enterprise companies — and this guide will help/save you from v8+
Read everything carefully and research on your own before attempting these steps. Always have a plan B.There are lots of versions of Tableau Server running in enterprise companies.
What version of Tableau Server are you running?
There are lots of versions of Tableau Server running in enterprise companies, this is a blanket overview that has worked 100% of the time.
Server upgrade can take a little time and also we’ve done several Tableau Server upgrades in a less than 4hours.
Having said that, please still ask your peers or IT staff for advice because every environment comes with its own best practices, the bigger the content, the longer the content takes to backup and restore.
- Run CMD as admin, shift right click then run as admin.
- Stop the service
- Tabadmin stop
- Check if down
- Tabadmin status
- Generate backup file
- http://kb.tableau.com/articles/knowledgebase/server-maintenance
- tabadmin backup <*directory w/ file name*>
- copy and paste this file to the VM desktop and the local machine desktop
- Keep more than one copy of this during the upgrade process, especially if there is only one instance of tableau server running (production instance)
- If you’re unable to get a clean VM to do a fresh install on: Do the following to clean up all old metadata and tableau related files
- Full Uninstall Tableau Server
- Add/remove programs — Uninstall Tableau Server
- OR Use the uninstall .exe in the Root directory
- If tableau server was ever installed on the C drive (check always):
- Open c:\programdata
- If c:\programdata\tableau exists, remove it after the uninstall
- Including any Tableau Server related directories
- Restart the OS
- Navigate to www.tableau.com/Server
- Download latest version of Tableau Server
- Install Tableau Server
- NOTE: Use anything other than the OS Drive (C:) to avoid the
- generation of c:\Programdata
- avoid competition for resources with the OS
- Install Tableau Server on its own drive!
After Upgrading Tableau Server — Restore Tableau Server — Steps and Best Practices
Okay, you are done with above, now you need to restore Tableau Server. Take your time, make sure everyone is aware of this outage, don’t skip steps.Restore Tableau Server can be done quickly if your backup isn’t massive.
- Restore from the previous Backup
- http://kb.tableau.com/articles/knowledgebase/server-maintenance
- tabadmin stop
- tabadmin restore <backupfilename.tsbak>
- tabadmin start
- Test connection to localhost
- check content
- users
- security
- etc
- Restart VM
- Update any scripts to point at new BIN directory
- Update environment variables to point at new BIN directory
This is the same road map every major installation has, if you have HEAVY extracts, or HEAVY amount of workbooks, your backup, restore, will take more time than others.
We worked around this by using another Virtual environment, doing all of the work on that environment, and letting the sysadmin handle an IP swap. This is not something I would recommend doing, or would be comfortable doing myself with a client installation. Best to talk to the internal technology owners + architects. The best sysadmins I’ve seen were able to make this swap — and there was ZERO downtime impacting the company. Just a quick HOT swap, and that required a little change management.
“Hey everyone, the Tableau Server is swapping to v9. And shutting down at 7pm CST on Saturday. If you’re working on anything during this time, it’s likely you will lose it. Please get your work uploaded in before 6pm.”
We made an assumption everyone would generate their own deadline, and be uploading content until 6pm. Giving us 1 hour of padding. Of course a smaller instance where you can practically throw a tennis ball and hit who ever is working on Tableau Server, you can make this swap, without getting super technical with the change management process. This particular customer has 300k employees+, and they are 100% traveling around, so we needed to offer a bit of risk mitigation.
Good luck and have fun! Tableau Server should JUST WORK, if it’s not, it’s probably weird folder permissions — and you should always have a scrum planning session with architects, product owners on the tech side, and the product owners for both the business and technology need to be present.
Best,
Tyler Garrett
Dev3lop
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