Migrate Datastax Enterprise Cassandra to Apache Cassandra or Datastax Community? - cassandra

I have a large, but simple Cassandra database on a Datastax 4.6 cluster. The license renewal is prohibitive for this very simple use case and I am trying to migrate to either a straight Apache or Datastax Comunity version. First is it possible to do an inline update?
I have altered all the keyspaces to remove the "EverywhereStrategy" replication strategy but I still get an error that the DSC version of cassandra I'm trying to get to join the cluster doesn't support it. I'm using Like Cassandra versions (2.0.16) and most other things seem to be close.
java.lang.RuntimeException: org.apache.cassandra.exceptions.ConfigurationException: Unable to find replication strategy class 'org.apache.cassandra.locator.EverywhereStrategy'
If it's not possible to do an inline upgrade what would be the best strategy to migrate a decent size (30 node, 150Tb) cluster?

So to make this work you have to extract any of the DSE features that you may have on any of your tables.
This meant I had to change the replication strategy on the dse_system table from EverywhereStrategy to SimpleStrategy with RF=3 (or almost anything after conversion you can drop this keyspace) The error message was:
java.lang.RuntimeException: org.apache.cassandra.exceptions.ConfigurationException: Unable to find replication strategy class 'org.apache.cassandra.locator.EverywhereStrategy'
I Also had to drop the unused CFS keyspaces. We never used the hadoop/CFS integration so we had nothing in these keyspaces anyway. I didn't capture the error for this.
We did have a solr index on a table we were testing on this cluster about a year ago so I had to drop this columnfamily. The error message was:
java.lang.RuntimeException: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.datastax.bdp.search.solr.Cql3SolrSecondaryIndex
There may be other incompatibilities if you use other features of Datastax Enterprise that you would have to remove, but this was enough for me to get the migration working.

dse-core.jar contains the EverywhereStrategy class.
We solved this problem by doing the following:
Replace everything except the above JAR so nodes can come up fine. Once all nodes are migrated to OSS, drop the dse_system keyspace (that uses this replication), delete the JAR and restart the nodes one by one.

Related

Unable to start DSE using SPARK_ENABLED=1

We are running 6 node cluster with:
HADOOP_ENABLED=0
SOLR_ENABLED=0
SPARK_ENABLED=0
CFS_ENABLED=0
Now, we would like to add Spark to all of them. It seems like "adding" is not the right term because this would not fail. Anyways, the steps we've done:
1. drained one of the nodes
2. changed /etc/default/dse to SPARK_ENABLED=1 and HADOOP_ENABLED=0
3. sudo service dse restart
And got the following in the log:
ERROR [main] 2016-05-17 11:51:12,739 CassandraDaemon.java:294 - Fatal exception during initialization
org.apache.cassandra.exceptions.ConfigurationException: Cannot start node if snitch's data center (Analytics) differs from previous data center (Cassandra). Please fix the snitch configuration, decommission and rebootstrap this node or use the flag -Dcassandra.ignore_dc=true.
There are two related questions that have been already answered:
Unable to start solr aspect of DSE search
Two node DSE spark cluster error setting up second node. Why?
Unfortunately, clearing the data on the node is not an option - why would I do that? I need the data to be intact.
Using "-Dcassandra.ignore_rack=true -Dcassandra.ignore_dc=true" is a bit scary in production. I don't understand why DSE wants to create another DC and why can't it just use the existing one?
I know that according to datastax's doc one should partition the load using different DC for different workloads. In our case we just want to run SPARK jobs on the same nodes that Cassandra is running using the same DC.
Is that possible?
Thanks!
The other answers are correct. The issue here is trying to warn you that you have previously identified this node as being in another DC. This means that it probably doesn't have the right data for any key-spaces with Network Topology Strategy. For example if you had a NTS keyspace which had only one replica in "Cassandra" and changed the DC to "Analytics" you could inadvertently lose all of the data.
This warning and the accompanying flag are telling you that you are doing something that you should not be doing in a production cluster.
The real solution to this is to explicitly name your dc's using GossipingFileSnitch and not rely on SimpleSnitch which names based on the DSE workload.
In this case, switch to GPFS and set the DC name to Cassandra.

Issues clearing data from a keyspace on Cassandra 2.1.3 + Stargate

Our QA Team has requested that we completely clear all data within the app's keyspace on our Cassandra 2.1.3 server prior to testing. (Cassandra 2.1.3 is running on an Ubuntu 14.04LTS Azure D12 instance [4 cores, 28GB Memory]).
We have attempted to TRUNCATE the column families and had problems with both Cassandra and Stargate index corruption afterwards. (returning incorrect/no data).
We have attempted to DELETE the data from the column families and had the same problem with indexes and tombstoning.
We were told to use DROP KEYSPACE with snapshot turned off; this resulted in Cassandra shutting down with all remote connections forcibly shut down, a partially deleted state on several occasions where we were able to access the keyspace via DevCenter, but it did not appear in the schema_keyspaces table, and/or corrupted indexes.
There are less than 100,000 records across 30 column families, so not a whole lot of data.
We cannot upgrade Cassandra to the latest version because Stargate only supports the C* 2.1.3 version.
Any other recommendations of how we can resolve this problem?
We answered the question internally.
Remove StarGate. Once we removed StarGate, the TRUNCATE and DROP KEYSPACE functionalities began to work appropriately again.
We notified StarGate support.

Enable Cassandra PasswordAuthenticator at up time

I have a Cassandra cluster (Datastax open source) and currently there is no authentication configured (i.e., it is using AllowAllAuthenticator), and I want to use PasswordAuthenticator. The official document says that I should follow these steps:
enable PasswordAuthenticator in cassandra.yaml,
restart the Cassandra node, which will create the system_auth keyspace,
change the system_auth replication factor,
create new user and password
However, this is a big problem to me because the cluster is used in production so we cannot have any downtime. Between step 2 and 4 no user has been configured yet, so even if the client supplies username and password, the request would still be rejected, which is not ideal.
I looked into the Datastax Enterprise doc, and it has a TransitionalAuthenticator class, which would create the system_auth keyspace but without rejecting requests. I wonder if this class can be ported to the open source version? Or if there are other ways around this problem? Thanks
Update
This is the Cassandra version I'm using:
cqlsh 4.1.1 | Cassandra 2.0.9 | CQL spec 3.1.1 | Thrift protocol 19.39.0
You should be able to execute steps 2-4 with just one node and have zero downtime, assuming proper client configuration, replication, and cluster capacity. Then, it's just a rolling restart of the remaining nodes.
Clients should be setup with credentials ahead of time, and they will start using them as nodes as nodes with authorizers come online (this behavior could depend on driver -- try it out first).
You might be able to manually generate the schema and data for steps 3-4 before engaging the CassandraAuthenticator, but that shouldn't be necessary.
What are your concerns about downtime?

Cassandra ring configuration

I am trying to connect Apache Cassandra nodes into a ring. They are not Datastax versions, but Cassandra 1.2.8 from the Apache website. When trying to add one as the seed of the other I get following exception:
Unable to find compaction strategy class 'com.datastax.bdp.hadoop.cfs.compaction.CFSCompactionStrategy'
Before that I change the "listen_address" and "rpc_address" to local IP address of each node. Next step I add one IP as a seed to another node. The nodes start up, an exception is printed but both nodes run fine until restart. After restarting either node the exception is printed and nodes do not run.
This is very strange - I do not have any DSE components.
Did you previously use any DSE components? If you did and are using the same data directory on any of your nodes, it may find old column families that were created with this compaction strategy. If you have no data you want in the data directories on all your nodes, you should clear them by stopping all nodes, deleting the directories, then starting the nodes.
Or if you have any DSE nodes still up, they may be joining the new cluster and propagating their schema, so creating column families with this compaction strategy. You can find out by looking in the logs and seeing which nodes try to connect. If any aren't from your 1.2.8 ring then this is probably the cause.
That error means you either had a DSE Analytics node in your ring at some point, or you restored your schema from someplace that had an Analytics node.
I would check if you have the folder /etc/dse/ on your VM, that would mean DSE was installed there.
To just wipe the node and start from scratch schema wise, you can stop the node, remove the /system/schema_* folders, then start the node. When it starts it will have no schema. Re-create any keyspaces/column families you had before, and they will get read from disk.

Mixing Datastax Enterprise with Cassandra community

I'm experimenting with Datastax Enterprise and I'm trying to have a cluster that mixes Enterprise nodes and standard Cassandra community nodes. I would only need a few nodes with advanced features like Solr and it would be nice to have all the nodes in the same cluster.
I tried to bootstrap a community node to a test Enterprise cluster, and it couldn't join the ring properly, throwing exceptions like that:
Unable to find compaction strategy class
'com.datastax.bdp.hadoop.cfs.compaction.CFSCompactionStrategy'
I assume that the Enterprise node tries to replicate CFs that have features from DSE, which are not recognized by the community node.
Is there a way to prevent that from happening? Am I trying to do something that's not possible/supported/allowed by DSE?
That is an unsupported configuration. The full cluster needs to be installed with DataStax enterprise binaries on all nodes. You can choose which nodes run as vanilla Cassandra, Hadoop or Solr by startup options on each node. DSE has a custom compaction strategy and snitch so that error is expected.

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