{"id":15340,"date":"2013-08-26T13:24:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-26T12:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=15340"},"modified":"2013-08-26T13:24:00","modified_gmt":"2013-08-26T12:24:00","slug":"configuring-quorum-on-storage-spaces-for-a-2-node-ws2012-and-ws2012-r2-cluster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=15340","title":{"rendered":"Configuring Quorum on Storage Spaces For A 2 Node WS2012 (and WS2012 R2) Cluster"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In this post I\u2019m going to talk about building a 2 node Windows Server 2012\/R2 failover cluster and what type of witness configuration to choose to achieve cluster quorum when the cluster\u2019s storage is a JBOD with Storage Spaces.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been messing about in the lab with a WS2012 R2 cluster, in particular, a Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) running on a failover cluster with Storage Spaces on a JBOD.&#160; What I\u2019m discussing applies equally to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A Hyper-V cluster that uses a SAS attached JBOD with Storage Spaces as the cluster storage<\/li>\n<li>A SOFS based on a JBOD with Storage Spaces<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Consider the build process of this 2 node cluster:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You attach a JBOD with raw disks to each cluster member<\/li>\n<li>You build the cluster<\/li>\n<li>You prepare Storage Spaces in the cluster and create your virtual disks<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Hmm, no witness was created to break the vote and get an uneven result.&#160; In fact, what happens is that the cluster will rig the vote to ensure that there is an uneven result.&#160; If you\u2019ve got 2 just nodes in the cluster with no witness then one has a quorum vote and the other doesn\u2019t.&#160; Imagine Node1 has a vote and Node2 does not have a vote.&#160; Now Node1 goes offline for whatever reason.&#160; Node2 does not have a vote and cannot achieve quorum; you don\u2019t have a cluster until Node1 comes back online.<\/p>\n<p>There are 2 simple solutions to this:<\/p>\n<h5>1) Create A File Share Witness<\/h5>\n<p>Create a file share on another highly available file server \u2013 uh \u2026 that\u2019ll be an issue for small\/medium business because all the virtual machines (including the file server) were going to be stored on the JBOD\/Storage Spaces.&#160; You can configure the file share as a witness for the cluster.<\/p>\n<h5>2) (More realistically) Create a Storage Spaces Virtual Disk As A Witness Disk<\/h5>\n<p>Create a small virtual disk (2-way or 3-way mirror for JBOD fault tolerance) and use that disk for quorum as the witness disk.&#160; A 1 GB disk will do; the smallest my Storage Spaces implementation would do was 5 GB but that\u2019s such a small amount anyway.&#160; This solution is pretty what you\u2019d do in a single site cluster with traditional block storage.<\/p>\n<p>We could go crazy talking about quorum options in cluster engineering.&#160; I\u2019ve given you 2 simple options, with the virtual disk as a witness being the simplest.&#160; Now each node has a vote for quorum with a witness to break the vote, and the cluster can survive either node failing.<\/p>\n<div id=\"scid:0767317B-992E-4b12-91E0-4F059A8CECA8:4167d015-df84-403b-902a-0140313867e6\" class=\"wlWriterEditableSmartContent\" style=\"float: none; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px\">Technorati Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/Windows+Server+2012\" rel=\"tag\">Windows Server 2012<\/a>,<a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/Windows+Server+2012+R2\" rel=\"tag\">Windows Server 2012 R2<\/a>,<a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/Hyper-V\" rel=\"tag\">Hyper-V<\/a>,<a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/Virtualisation\" rel=\"tag\">Virtualisation<\/a>,<a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/Failover+Clustering\" rel=\"tag\">Failover Clustering<\/a>,<a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tags\/Storage\" rel=\"tag\">Storage<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this post I\u2019m going to talk about building a 2 node Windows Server 2012\/R2 failover cluster and what type of witness configuration to choose to achieve cluster quorum when the cluster\u2019s storage is a JBOD with Storage Spaces. I\u2019ve been messing about in the lab with a WS2012 R2 cluster, in particular, a Scale-Out &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=15340\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Configuring Quorum on Storage Spaces For A 2 Node WS2012 (and WS2012 R2) Cluster&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[63,181,99,195,118,120],"class_list":["post-15340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hyper-v","tag-failover-clustering","tag-hyper-v","tag-storage","tag-virtualisation","tag-windows-server-2012","tag-windows-server-2012-r2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}