Installing the DataStax Distribution of Apache Cassandra 3.x on RHEL-based systems

Install using Yum repositories on RHEL, CentOS, and Oracle Linux.

DataStax no longer provides the DataStax Community version of Apache Cassandra™ or the DataStax Distribution of Apache Cassandra. See DataStax support for Apache Cassandra.
To download and install the latest version of open-source Cassandra, see https://cassandra.apache.org/.
Attention: OpsCenter is not supported or installed with Cassandra 2.2 and later.

Use these steps to install Cassandra using Yum repositories on RHEL, CentOS, and Oracle Linux.

Note: To install on SUSE, use the Cassandra binary tarball distribution.

Prerequisites

  • Ensure that your platform is supported.
  • Yum Package Management application installed.
  • Root or sudo access to the install machine.
  • Latest version of Oracle Java Platform, Standard Edition 8 (JDK) or OpenJDK 8.
    Note: The JDK is recommended for development and production systems. It provides tools that are not in the JRE, such as jstack, jmap, jps, and jstat, that are useful for troubleshooting.
  • Python 2.7.

The packaged releases create a cassandra user. When starting Cassandra as a service, the service runs as this user. The following utilities are included in a separate package: sstable2json, sstablelevelreset, sstablemetadata, json2sstable, sstablerepairedset, sstablesplit, and token-generator.

Procedure

In a terminal window:

  1. Check which version of Java is installed by running the following command: 
    $ java -version
    It is recommended to use the latest version of Oracle Java 8 or OpenJDK 8 on all nodes.
  2. Add the DataStax Distribution of Apache Cassandra 3.x repository to the /etc/yum.repos.d/datastax.repo: 
    [datastax-ddc] 
name = DataStax Repo for Apache Cassandra
baseurl = http://rpm.datastax.com/datastax-ddc/3.version_number
enabled = 1
gpgcheck = 0
    Note: Be sure to specify the version number. For example: 3.2.
  3. Install the latest packages: 
    $ sudo yum install datastax-ddc

    This command automatically installs the Cassandra utilities such as sstablelevelreset, sstablemetadata, sstableofflinerelevel, sstablerepairedset, sstablesplit, token-generator. Each utility provides usage/help information; type help after entering the command.

  4. Optional: Single-node cluster installations only.
    1. Start Cassandra: 
      $ sudo service cassandra start
      On some Linux distributions, you many need to use:
      $ sudo /etc/init.d/cassandra start
      Note: Cassandra 3.8 and later: Startup is aborted if corrupted transaction log files are found and the affected log files are logged. See the log files for information on resolving the situation.
    2. Verify that DataStax Distribution of Apache Cassandra is running: 
      $ nodetool status
      Datacenter: datacenter1
=======================
Status=Up/Down
|/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving
--  Address             Load       Tokens  Owns    Host ID                               Rack
UN  127.0.0.147.66 KB   47.66 KB   256     100%    aaa1b7c1-6049-4a08-ad3e-3697a0e30e10  rack1

What's next