Cassandra 4.x Setup

November 25, 2020

Cassandra is an open-source, distributed, wide column store, NoSQL database management system. It is designed to handle large amounts of data across compute resource or servers. It provides high availability with no single point of failure. It offers robust support for clusters spanning multiple datacenters with asynchronous masterless replication allowing low latency operations for all clients.

This post is geared at a base installation of Apache Cassandra 4.x in one of two modes:

Standalone Mode
Cluster Mode

Systems Requirement for clustered/multi node setup

Hosts	Systems Specification
cassandra01	2 CPU 4GB RAM 40GB Storage
cassandra02	2 CPU 4GB RAM 40GB Storage
cassandra03	2 CPU 4GB RAM 40GB Storage

Systems Requirement for standalone node setup

Hosts	Systems Specification
cassandra	2 CPU 4GB RAM 40GB Storage

NOTE: You can make changes as needed. The above is just a base systems spec. for our POC

Package Installation

We will be running our setup on CentOS based servers. Run this command on all servers

sudo yum update -y
sudo yum group install -y 'Development Tools'
sudo yum install -y libxml2 libxml2-devel libxslt libxslt-devel wget gcc libffi-devel \
openssl-devel make openssl-devel bzip2-devel java-11-openjdk-devel java-11-openjdk 

Configure Cassandra Repository

sudo bash -c 'cat <<EOF>> /etc/yum.repos.d/cassandra.repo
[cassandra]  
name=Apache Cassandra
baseurl=https://www.apache.org/dist/cassandra/redhat/40x/
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://www.apache.org/dist/cassandra/KEYS
EOF'

Install Cassandra

sudo yum update -y && sudo yum install -y cassandra

Enable and start cassandra services

sudo systemctl enable cassandra 
sudo systemctl start cassandra

Test out installation by running this command nodetool status. if all goes well, you should see this:

Datacenter: datacenter1
=======================
Status=Up/Down
|/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving
--  Address    Load       Tokens  Owns (effective)  Host ID                               Rack 
UN  127.0.0.1  73.28 KiB  256     ?                 74aed20b-6a72-4b88-9d55-997aa8e00283  rack1

At this point you should be all set for the standalone setup

Multi Node Cassandra Setup

The following steps outlines base configs and updates for a multi node clister setup

Stop the service and delete the contents of the data folder

sudo service cassandra stop
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/cassandra/data/system/*

Edit /etc/cassandra/default.conf/cassandra.yaml using your favorite editor. Update the following:
- cluster_name: “Test Cluster”
- num_tokens: 256
- -seeds: “cassandra01, cassandra02, cassandra03”
- listen_address: “cassandra01”
- rpc_address: “cassandra01”
- endpoint_snitch: GossipingPropertyFileSnitch
Repeat previous steps on all servers changing the following as needed for cassandra02 and cassandra03
- listen_address: “”
- rpc_address: “”
Edit /etc/cassandra/default.conf/cassandra-rackdc.properties using your favorite editor. Update the following:
- dc=”DEVLABS_DC”
- rack=”RACK1”
Restart the service on all nodes
```
sudo systemctl restart cassandra
```
verify status to be sure everything is working correctly
```
sudo systemctl status cassandra
```

Loginto any node and check the node status. Type this command nodetool status. If all goes well, you should see this:

Datacenter: DEVLABS_DC
======================
Status=Up/Down
|/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving
--  Address        Load        Tokens  Owns (effective)  Host ID                               Rack 
UN  192.168.1.235  296.15 KiB  256     ?                 437cc9b6-a528-4454-9655-5e775895dfc2  RACK1
UN  192.168.1.236  296.12 KiB  256     ?                 577a9114-433a-42fb-9784-1926f4798c52  RACK1
UN  192.168.1.234  275.66 KiB  256     ?                 b7f42478-12bc-439c-b565-b4d070c3f344  RACK1

Reference

Apache Cassandra