Enabling virtual nodes on a new cluster
Steps and recommendations for enabling virtual nodes (vnodes) on a new cluster.
Generally when all nodes have equal hardware capability, they should have the same number of virtual nodes (vnodes). If the hardware capabilities vary among the nodes in your cluster, assign a proportional number of vnodes to the larger machines.
Note: DataStax recommends using 8 vnodes (tokens). Using 8 vnodes distributes the
workload between systems with a ~10% variance and has minimal impact on performance.
The location of the cassandra.yaml file depends on
the type of installation:
| Package installations | /etc/cassandra/cassandra.yaml |
| Tarball installations | install_location/resources/cassandra/conf/cassandra.yaml |
Procedure
Set the number of tokens on each node in your cluster with the num_tokens parameter in the
cassandra.yaml file.
Important: Do not set the initial_token
parameter.