There is no "shutdown" command in cassandra, it's designed to be stopped by killing it.  The pid file is created by the *nix scripts and is not supported by the cassandra.bat file for windows.  There have been a couple of discussions on running cassandra as a service under windows.. http://www.mail-archive.com/user@cassandra.apache.org/msg01765.html http://www.mail-archive.com/user@cassandra.apache.org/msg04021.html http://coderjournal.com/2010/06/run-cassandra-as-a-windows-service/ Hope that helps.  Aaron On 02 Dec, 2010,at 06:14 AM, rambabu pakala wrote: Hi, Can someone please let me know how to shutdown Cassandra on Windows Environment? stop-server is actually kiing the Cassandra Server and I was unable to create/get a pid file for the Cassandra process. Are there any setup steps that are needed that I am missing? Thanks, -Ram.