Cassandra with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software: Scale and resilience simplified

[HPE_Experts]

Discover how the HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software can provide a compelling virtualization solution for deploying Apache Cassandra cluster environments.

As organizations continue to grapple with how to manage their ever-growing datasets, the need for a database platform that can grow as needed to match those datasets is critical. In addition, being able to handle differing datatypes requires a flexibility that some traditional relational databases cannot supply. That’s why the Apache Cassandra NoSQL platform has become so appealing, especially for real-time analytics and AI modeling environments.

Cassandra users need an infrastructure that meshes well with its distributed and scalable architecture. Simple in concept, yet effective, Cassandra clusters can add nodes on the fly as needed to enhance capacity and performance. Whether the cluster is three nodes or 30, the database automatically scales to make use of newly added nodes while providing high availability by replicating data across the cluster.

The HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software hypervisor solution provides the need for a flexible, easily scalable infrastructure. Cassandra users can take advantage of the VM Essentials provisioning capabilities to spin up new cluster nodes quickly. Cassandra clusters can be spread across multiple VM Essentials instances to provide multisite protection.   Plus, the built-in backup capability provides an extra layer of data protection along with supported integrations with backup applications such as HPE Zerto Software, Veeam, and Commvault.

Figure 1. Cassandra clusters with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software

Creating Cassandra instance in HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software

When deploying a Cassandra cluster in VM Essentials, future scaling of the cluster can be simplified by creating and storing a virtual image of a cluster node. The process is as follows:

• Create a virtual image using the ISO image of the OS version you will use.
• Create a new instance using that ISO virtual image.
• From the console of that instance, update the OS with the necessary packages/patches/OS settings to match the other cluster nodes, install Cassandra, and edit the Cassandra config files for joining the cluster. Refer to the Cassandra documentation for more information.
• From the Actions menu for the instance, select Import as Image to store the new virtual image.

Now, whenever it is necessary to spin up a new Cassandra node, a ready-to-use template is available to provision a new virtual machine node for the cluster in a matter of minutes.

Protecting the Cassandra instance

Multisite clustering:

The replication factor setting in Cassandra controls how many copies of the data are replicated across the cluster for high availability. If a node or nodes fail, Cassandra can access these replicated copies to maintain the cluster automatically.  For multisite availability, the cluster can be extended by adding nodes in other locations. This ensures that even in the event of a data center loss, Cassandra will still stay online.

Clusters deployed in VM Essentials can easily be extended by setting up a new VM Essentials deployment in an off-site location. As long as the cluster nodes have network connectivity, Cassandra will establish database replication according to the replication factor setting. This deployment process can be simplified by exporting the virtual image created previously and uploading it to the new VM Essentials setup. 

• From the Virtual Images view in the Library, select the template and click Download in the settings menu for the template.
• Move the downloaded image to the new site and, from the Virtual Images view there, click Add and qcow2. Drag-and-drop the image or click Add File to upload the image and create the new template in the remote site.       

Backups in VM Essentials

VM Essentials customers can use multiple options to protect their Cassandra clusters from within the VM Essentials framework. Users can configure backup schedules for their virtual machines or instances to the storage available to VM Essentials. A synthetic full option utilizing snapshots is available, as well. Integrations with several major data protection applications are supported to allow VM Essentials backups to be centrally managed in an existing data protection environment. All these options add to the existing replication capability in Cassandra to ensure cluster data protection.

Conclusion

A hypervisor-based deployment of Apache Cassandra produces a scenario that maximizes hardware functionality while supporting the grow-as-you-need architecture. Deploying Cassandra using the HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software hypervisor platform satisfies the needs of this scenario, while providing additional high availability and data protection options to ensure that users can realize the potential of their valuable datasets. 

To find out more about HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software, check out the HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software webpage. 

Try the solution out for yourself by downloading a trial version of the latest HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software release. Follow the step-by-step activation guide training on this page, then use the link Start with a free trial to download and deploy the VM Essentials setup in your environment.

Blog Author:
Kevin McNally,
Senior Systems Engineer, HPE Hybrid Cloud Solutions Engineering

Meet Storage Expert blogger Kevin McNally, solution engineer for data analytics and AI, HPE

Kevin has been a contributor with HPE Storage Technical Marketing and Solutions Engineering for over a decade and has been with Compaq/HP/HPE for over 25 years. His current focus is on NoSQL databases and AI development products, and how to best align HPE Hybrid Cloud products to the specialized needs of customers using those environments.

Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn.