Continuing on from Getting started with Cassandra I’m now trying to configure two servers as a cluster. The Getting Started Step 3 was not clear the first time I read it (after writing this is makes sense), so a Google search yielded the second link as Building a Small Cassandra Cluster for Testing and Development. I love finding reference material from people I know, Padraig being a significant contributor to Drizzle.

Here is what I did to create a running Cassandra Cluster.

• Stop individual Cassandra instances
• Re-created data and log directories (I did this just to ensure a clean slate)
• I added to my local hosts file two aliases for my servers (cass01 and cass02). This helped in the following step.
• Three changes are needed to the default conf/storage-conf.xml file on my first server.
  • Change <ListenAddress> from localhost to cass01
  • Change <ThristAddress> from localhost to cass01
  • Change <Seed> from 127.0.0.1 to cass01
• On my second server I changed the <ListenAddress> and <ThriftAddress> accordingly to cass02 and made <Seed> cass01
• Started Cassandra servers and tested successfully using the set …/get Keyspace1.Standard1[‘jsmith’] example. I was able to connect to both hosts via cassandra-cli and see the results created on just one node. I was able to create data on the second node and view on the first node.

A new command is available to describe your cluster.

$ bin/nodeprobe -host cass01 ring
Address       Status     Load          Range                                      Ring
                                       148029780173059661585165369000220362256
192.168.100.4 Up         0 bytes       59303445267720348277007645348152900920     |<--|
192.168.100.5 Up         0 bytes       148029780173059661585165369000220362256    |-->|

Now with my first introduction successful, time to start using and seeing the true power of using Cassandra.