Following are some tips you may need while using Cassandra:
Cassandra may work on Windows, but remember that this is a fairly new development in the Cassandra world. If you want the best chance of building a successful cluster, build it on Linux.
Cassandra needs 7199
for JMX (nodetool), 7000
for gossip, 7001
for gossip over SSL, and 9042
for native binary (client connections). You shouldn't need Thrift (port 9160
), so don't open the port or enable the protocol unless you have a reason to.