The best practice for “Cassandra on Windows” right now is “don't.” There are problems with boundary cases on Windows, because things like file descriptors behave somewhat differently and do not have the same guarantees as on Linux.
It works well enough to run a daemon / test instance in your Windows window for development purposes. But for anything else besides this, you really should use Linux, as this is all that everyone uses and has the most testing.
Here is a blog post with the current status of Cassandra on Windows:
http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/cassandra-and-windows-past-present-and-future
Zanson
source share