CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cassandra
Jay
Jay

Reputation: 20136

Guide on smallest VM needed for test/learning cassandra setup

Want to rent a small collection of VM's so I can play around with and learn Cassandra. Whats the minimum memory (and maybe) disk footprint you can get away with?

For the sake of the exercise, lets assume I'm starting with three nodes.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 512

Answers (3)

Theo
Theo

Reputation: 132862

If you just want to play around with a cluster and not necessarily have something running all of the time you can try running a cluster on your own machine without running separate VMs for each node with ccm.

Upvotes: 0

mark
mark

Reputation: 107

Cassandra can scale down well for testing so EC2 small instances or equivalent will be fine. Later, if you plan on performance/load testing, you can scale up. Be sure to adjust/check the config - especially the JVM heap and size it according to the server spec.

If you're just wanting to learn the software, data modelling, CQL etc and replication isn't important just yet then a single server would work fine too - just create keyspaces with a replication factor of 1. I run cassandra on my laptop for development work and it's quite happy with 0.5 gig of jvm heap.

Upvotes: 2

Theo
Theo

Reputation: 132862

People have been running Cassandra on RaspberryPi's (watch a talk on YouTube, or look at some slides on SlideShare), so the minimum specs required are pretty low. The RaspberryPi has 500 megs of RAM and an ARM CPU running at 700 Mhz.

For disk space there's very little needed before you start writing data, then it scales roughly linerally with the data (but remember that removing things actually increases the disk usage temporarily, and compactions require some extra space too while they are running).

For playing you probably won't need much more than the equivalent of a RaspberryPi, but running it on say three EC2 m1.small works absolutely fine. I haven't run it on t1.micro, but it should work (t1.micro is actually spec'ed lower than a RaspberryPi, although it probably has faster disk IO).

Upvotes: 2

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