Question

should i use a witness

  • 27 June 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 937 views

I am looking for other customers who have used the witness feature.

We have three buildings each about 1 mile from each other. 10g fiber between them. We have two Nutanix clusters, one in each of two of the buildings. We have the ultimate licensing and are already using Metro clustering. I have the fail over set to manual. Today I setup a witness server in the third building. As far as I can tell everything is working. The real question is should I use it? Is anyone using the witness. Does it cause more problems than it solves. At least with manual I have full control when a fail over happens. So far it has been easier to fix my issues than to fail over and almost all issues are network related not nutanix.

This topic has been closed for comments

2 replies

Badge
Hi ! I see this only now and this subject is of interest to me. I'll develop on this when I will have effectively deployed my 2 sites cluster sync replication with witness.

My main goals here is to be able to achieve my client SLA on BC/DR on all scenarii.

Best regards,

Virttom
Userlevel 3
Badge +4

With the new Witness capability, the process of disabling Metro Availability and Promoting the Container in case of a site outage or a network failure is fully automated which ensures the fastest possible RTO.  The Witness functionality is only used in case of a failure, meaning a Witness failure itself will not affect VMs running on either site.

 Metro Guide with 5.0 considerations including the Metro Witness is available :

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/solutions/details/?targetId=BP-2009_Metro_Availability:BP-2009_Metro_Availability