Cassandra upgrade from 2.0.x to 2.1.x or 3.0.x

Question

I\'ve searched for previous versions of this question, but none seem to fit my case. I have an existing Cassandra cluster running 2.0.x. I\'ve been allocated new VMs, so I d

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible to migrate data to a different environment (the new vm's with the updated Cassandra using sstableloader, but you will need C* 3.0.5 and above, as that version added support to upload sstables from previous versions.

Once that the process is completed it is recommended to execute nodetool upgradesstables to ensure that there are no incompatibilities on the data, and a nodetool cleanup.

Regarding your comment ... it implies that any upgrade requiring SSTable upgrades would require all nodes to be taken offline simultaneously;... is not true; doing the upgrade one node at a time will create a mixed cluster with nodes with the two versions as you mentioned, which is not optimal, but will allow you to avoid any downtime in production. (Note that the impact of this operation will depend on the consistency level used in your application.)