Thanks Mark

FYI, a video just released on this topic...  Video: Upgrading from Tableau Server 2018.1 or earlier

Here's what we were passing around in the consultancy here at tableau. Also, I left this as a leave behind when i helped Deloitte with their Tableau Server upgrade from single to cluster.

1. Run CMD as admin, shift right click then run as admin.
2. Stop the service
   1. Tabadmin stop
3. Check if down
   1. Tabadmin status
4. Generate backup file
   1. http://kb.tableau.com/articles/knowledgebase/server-maintenance
   2. tabadmin backup <*directory w/ file name*>
   3. 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
5. Full Uninstall Tableau Server
   1. Add/remove programs – Uninstall Tableau Server
   2. OR Use the uninstall .exe in the Root directory
   3. If tableau server was ever installed on the C drive (check always):
      1. Open c:\programdata
      2. If c:\programdata\tableau exists, remove it after the uninstall
      3. Including any Tableau Server related directories
6. Restart the OS
7. Navigate to www.tableau.com/Server
   1. Download latest version of Tableau Server
8. Install Tableau Server
   1. NOTE: Use anything other than the OS Drive (C:) to avoid the
      1. generation of c:\Programdata
      2. avoid competition for resources with the OS
   2. Install Tableau Server on its own drive!

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.

1. Restore from the previous Backup
   1. http://kb.tableau.com/articles/knowledgebase/server-maintenance
   2. tabadmin stop
   3. tabadmin restore <backupfilename.tsbak>
   4. tabadmin start
2. Test connection to localhost
   1. check content
   2. users
   3. security
   4. etc
3. Restart VM
4. Update any scripts to point at new BIN directory
5. Update environment variables to point at new BIN directory

Posted here w/ more ad-hoc advice & empirical observations - https://dev3lop.com/upgrade-tableau-server-restore-tableau-server/

Question; has anything changed since v8.0? Besides security offerings and Tableau Server UX?

Best,

Tyler Garrett

Excuse verbose response, I'm eager to communicate something here.

It's a good point but I don't agree, and have a bit to say about this thought process because documentation is extremely important to getting transparency into your environment, and you get to remove the "emotional" feeling of needing to upgrade because it's available. I rather make these upgrade decisions based on previous developed documentation, business value, and appropriate reasonings that justify the project.

Before I begin, I want to say you made a great point, documenting is important, but if we are recommending documentation this late in the game...

And waiting until there's an installation... upgrade... implementation... I'm going to say, no. This is wrong and we should consider an alternative.

We could completely re-consider the importance of this particular bullet, and consider it to be the PARENT.

The Child would be "upgrading"...

Study, research, data science, etc your Parent task, then progress to the child because the parent made it rather obvious there needs to be an upgrade.

But you can't make that with "subjective analysis."

(refers to the process of thinking and reasoning about matters...)

My opinions are empirical observations &

Documentation of your environment needs to happen well before this "step." Otherwise from a blimp view perspective, you will never get much transparency into your environment, outside of the obvious "errors."

I do not add these steps because it's an entirely different conversation. If you want to upgrade from 1 version to another, it should not be the time to call in the documentation police. Yes, you should document what you do, you're making changes, changes need to be documented, or you're failing a lot of compliance and regulations. But, moreover, upgrading should not initiate a reasoning to document architecture.

Schedules, outages, documenting these "custom settings" are merely processes to deal with if the client/customer/job has never done this process before and I feel that needs to be in a completely different phase from an install/upgrade process. Like i mentioned above, horse before cart, cart before horse, parent to child relationship, and this is merely my opinion after doing 80 server installs at Tableau, and 100's more related Tableau upgrades/installs/optimization and architecture reviews....

So let me say clearly; my opinion is - If you're now documenting these things, sounds like there is other problems, and the environment needs more help than a simple upgrade. It's likely the initial installation was setup by someone who did not consider documentation to be very important...

Lastly, I did not include the bullet because there's a great chance there's bigger problems, much bigger architecture problems, and I can't imagine any environment without documentation, would consider upgrading to a different application version. That to me seems like good way to waste time.

Imagine moving from platform to platform, without any previous documentation generated regarding the last environment... Yikes.

Also, in short... I didn't mention it because from my perspective the upgrade/backup/restore should not be requiring further documentation or implementation. Otherwise the backup process and restore steps are not working correctly and you should open a support case.

I haven't played with Tableau Server in a couple years and maybe my opinions on the topic are getting OLD... because I don't want anything to do with Tableau server administration, truthfully rather watch others play that role and focus on solving problems within the full stack. Mostly because Tableau Server has not changed from version 8, don't play the game of "oh this is new, oh this is new..." From a problem solving perspective, Tableau Server is not solving new problems, they are solving the same problems as before...

If anything every new update has offered a deeper granularity that is going to make things more complex to administrate and learn.

However, I know it's no easy task to develop a server implementation, I know upgrades are MORE than function updates, I understand the code is constantly needing to be fixed, cleaned, updated...

With that said... Seriously... Kudos for the new security implementations, and I'm glad the API is cleaner and more documented, I'm glad the UX is better, I'm glad site migration doesn't require a fat stack of scripting against tabcmd, I'm glad it's easier to do the same things we did in 2014 installs in version 8, 9, 10, etc... It's a kick *** platform.

Best,

TylerG