{"id":17492,"date":"2014-12-12T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-12T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=17492"},"modified":"2014-12-12T13:15:11","modified_gmt":"2014-12-12T13:15:11","slug":"cluster-cloud-witness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=17492","title":{"rendered":"Windows Server Technical Preview – Cluster Cloud Witness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine a multi-site or stretch cluster that spans sites A and B. Hosts are running in Site A and Site B and are nodes in that cluster. A critical function of a cluster is to calculate quorum in the event of a site outage or a link failure \u2013 one site must have more than half of the available votes to have quorum and continue operating as a cluster (and failover the VMs from the other site).<\/p>\n

The recommended solution for this in the past was to create a file share witness \u2026 operating in a third site. So first you needed a third site. That\u2019s not going to be cheap! And then you needed, ideally, a file server cluster running in that third site to ensure that the file share witness was highly available.<\/p>\n

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Windows Server vNext offers a new advanced quorum option of using a Cloud Witness. This is where we use Azure as a witness. Folks \u2013 this is going to be one seriously affordable option!<\/p>\n

You create a blob storage account in Azure. This will store just an incremental sequence number; it\u2019s just a vote so the cluster will remain operational if Azure has issues. This will cost just a few cents per month to operate.<\/p>\n

You then configure the cluster with the storage account name and storage account key for secure access. The cluster will then use Azure as a witness. This is a lot easier and cheaper than configuring a file share witness on a cluster in a third site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagine a multi-site or stretch cluster that spans sites A and B. Hosts are running in Site A and Site B and are nodes in that cluster. A critical function of a cluster is to calculate quorum in the event of a site outage or a link failure \u2013 one site must have more than … Continue reading “Windows Server Technical Preview – Cluster Cloud Witness”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[181,195,137],"class_list":["post-17492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hyper-v","tag-hyper-v","tag-virtualisation","tag-windows-server-2016"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t