Witness

The witness is an essential component for leveraging automated failover events. It is used to act as the third party in the quorum to break a tie. A witness is a software component that can either run on Windows or Linux as a virtual machine or a bare metal system. It is important to note that the witness cannot be one of the cluster nodes itself. The witness installs as a lightweight service and communicates with both HA cluster nodes via the management interface.

The Witness does not take any part during manual failover initiated by a system administrator nor does it play any role in data presentation.

To install the witness on a Linux or Windows system, follow the appropriate guide below.