Cloud witness and secondary disaster recovery databases

Question

Hi,

So, I wanted to get some clarification on whether I should add the nodes in my secondary region to my cloud witness that is already setup in the primary region.

Background information: This is in relation to disaster recovery. There are a total of 8 nodes in the cluster, 4 in the primary region and four in the secondary region. As of now, only the nodes in the primary region are setup with a cloud witness. Thanks in advance for any information provided.

Answer 1

Hi @RosslynOringi-5039

Yes, this may be usefull for your environment. the Cloud witness as quorum would help to identify the appropiate availability depending on the region in case of nodes down in one region.

For reference I would just mention the Cloud Witness article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/failover-clustering/deploy-cloud-witness

In general, Whether the cluster continues running depends on how many nodes are online in the other regions—the remaining nodes need a majority of votes in the cluster quorum, which could be tricky if you have two nodes + the cloud witness go down together, but with 4 Nodes you can ensure resilience and reliability to the structure.

Here is an example of four nodes plus a witness: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/concepts/quorum#four-nodes-with-a-witness
• In this example, if you had two nodes + the witness go offline, the cluster would go down because the remaining two nodes have 2/5 of the votes, which doesn’t comprise a majority.
• I’m thinking in this kind of scenario, you might want to put the cloud witness in a different region than the primary region so it can act in its intended role as an external tiebreaker.

Hope this helps with your query,

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