Starting the Kafka server To start the Apache Kafka server, start Apache Zookeeper and then start the corresponding Kafka server. Procedure Open the folder where Apache Kafka is installed. cd <MDM_INSTALL_HOME>/kafka_<version> Start Apache Zookeeper. ./zookeeper-server-start.sh ../config/zookeeper.properties Start the Kafka server. ./kafka-server-start.sh ../config/server.properties