Windows Server 2016 Clustering: Cloud Witness

There are many new features in Windows Server 2016, but one interesting one is the new Cloud Witness feature for using with Windows Server Failover Clustering.

Essentially, you use a Azure Storage Account which you can store a blob file in. The Cloud Witness feature creates a Container called msft-cloud-witness under the Azure Storage Account given. In this container a single blob file is written with cluster’s unique ID used as the file name of the blob file.

To access your Azure Storage Account and thus the Cloud Witness, you use the URL and  the Primary Access Key and storage account name.

Then once setup in your cluster you’ll see it shown in your Failover Cluster Manager as below;

This gives us more options for our cluster configuration.

With the introduction of Dynamic Quorum in Windows Server 2012 and then, the extremely useful, Dynamic Witness in Windows Server 2012 R2 we’ve just got another feature where we can utilise a third, highly available, site to help with our availability and to maintain Quorum.

Thanks for reading!