We are in the process of building out a new DR system in another Data Center, and we want to mirror our Cassandra environment to that DR. I have a couple questions on the best way to do this after reading the documentation on the Datastax website. We didn't initially plan for this to be a DR setup when first deployed a while ago due to budgeting, but now we need to. So I'm just trying to nail down the order of doing this as well as any potential issues.
For the nodes, we don't plan on querying the servers in this DR until we fail over to this data center. We are going to have 5 similar nodes in the DR, should I join them into the ring at token+1? All keyspaces are set to the replication strategy of SimpleStrategy. Can I change the replication strategy after joining the new nodes in the DR to NetworkTopologyStategy with the updated replication factor for each dr? Lastly, is changing snitch from default of SimpleSnitch to RackInferringSnitch going to cause any issues? Since its in the Cassandra.yaml file I assume a rolling restart to pick up the value would be ok? This is all on Cassandra 1.1.4, Thanks for any help!
