Apache Cassandra has a long-standing presence on Linux-based operating systems (OS), and will run just fine on many flavors of Linux (both RHEL and Debian-based), UNIX, and BSD. As of Apache Cassandra 2.2, Windows is now supported as a host operating system.
For production clusters, Apache Cassandra should be deployed on the most recent, Long Term Support (LTS) release of a Debian or RHEL based Linux.
Cassandra on Windows is still a very new development. If you want to ensure that your cluster is high-performing and problem-free, run it on Linux. The majority of the material in this book assumes that Cassandra is being deployed on Linux.
This book will describe installation variants for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Debian), and CentOS 7.4 (RHEL) Linux.
