Scale‑Out File Server.
But first, we're going to do cluster witness.
What is cluster witness?
Well,
we've talked a bit so far in this course about the concept of cluster quorum,
which represents a majority vote count to keep the cluster online.
Each node in your cluster is going to have a vote, and you
need to think in advance about if you're starting with an
even or odd number of nodes,
what happens if a node becomes unavailable either through a
planned maintenance event or an unplanned outage?
This is where a witness can come in to provide a tie‑breaking vote.
A witness is not a cluster node.
Instead, it can be a disk, that is an accessible shared disk.
That disk needs to be connectable from all cluster nodes.
So Microsoft recommends that if you're going to do a disk witness,
it should be for a single‑site cluster only. If you're
doing a stretch cluster across sites,
it's presumed that you can access SMB file shares between those
sites, so file share witness is an option for multi‑site clusters.
But honestly, in a hybrid cloud orientation,
as long as your cluster nodes have internet connectivity,
there's the cloud witness, which is a file share in an Azure storage account.
Again, it's a convenient way to maintain a witness that's globally accessible, literally globally accessible.