What is the best witness to use in practice?

Salves 501 Reputation points
2020-08-31T02:53:17.28+00:00

Hi,

on a three-node cluster that does not have a shared disk, what options would be best for use in a witness?

If my DR environment is on Azure and the activation of it will be manual faiolver, that is, it the third node will only be able to go into operation after I decide.

I must exclude the node that is in DR Azure from the witness settings, correct?

But how do I start the cluster again since it will be shut down as soon as the other non-DR Azure nodes are unavailable?

The witness must be beside the two nodes that will be active / passive, correct?

Thank you.

Windows Server Clustering
Windows Server Clustering
Windows Server: A family of Microsoft server operating systems that support enterprise-level management, data storage, applications, and communications.Clustering: The grouping of multiple servers in a way that allows them to appear to be a single unit to client computers on a network. Clustering is a means of increasing network capacity, providing live backup in case one of the servers fails, and improving data security.
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  1. Shashank Singh 6,251 Reputation points
    2020-08-31T14:01:41.707+00:00

    Some kind of witness is must when you have 3 node WSFC. You can check out all possible scenarios from this MS Document. If you are not using Shared storage you can have File share witness cloud witness is complex and has latency I would suggest on premises witness. In any case if on premises goes down you can manually bring node online in Azure.

    I am also assuming you have Windows server 2012 r2 and above to take benefit of dynamic quorum and witness which basically has "last man standing feature". This mean if you nodes go down one after another the dynamic nature of witness would keep last node running by removing votes from members which went down. This would not work when you have multiple unexpected shutdown of the nodes.

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  1. Xiaowei He 9,891 Reputation points
    2020-08-31T06:57:40.423+00:00

    Hi,

    According to your description, you can use file share witness or Azure witness. Node 1 and node 2 in primary site need to both connect to the witness, the third node can even or not even connect to the witness.

    Besides, it's recommended to set the node in DR site's vote to be 0.

    https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/failover-clusters/windows/configure-cluster-quorum-nodeweight-settings?view=sql-server-ver15

    What's more, it's recommended to set two nodes in the DR site for symmetry.

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    Anne

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  2. TimCerling(ret) 1,156 Reputation points
    2020-08-31T13:00:39.367+00:00

    "on a three-node cluster that does not have a shared disk, what options would be best for use in a witness?"

    Without shared disk, the only option available is some form of file share witness.

    But, without shared disk, what sort of application are you trying to create in an application cluster? Every application that I have ever seen put into a cluster requires some form of shared storage. If you are not providing shared storage, you may be better served by some other form of high availability. Something like storage replication with scripted failover.

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