I have two Windows 2008 R2 VMs (ESXi) running Double-Take.
We currently have a Health-check running on our Netscaler to force a failover from the primary VM to the secondary VM if the Netscaler cannot access the an SMB share on the Primary VM.
This hasn't proven to be a good method of providing Fault Tolerance, so I am trying to cluster these two VMs using a File Share Witness.
(I should add that my client engineers this solution, I only implement according to their requirements).
The Witness share has been created on an EMC VNX. My domain account and the domain Cluster Computer Name account both have Full Control permissions on the Share.
I have installed the File Services Role as well as the Failover Clustering Feature on both VMs.
To configure the Quorum, I am selecting Node and File Share Majority (For Clusters with special configuration).
I am providing the IP address and share name in the form of \\<ipaddress>\<sharename>.
The wizard returns \\<ipaddress>\<sharename> is not a valid share path.
Reading the documentation from Microsoft, there is a statement saying that the witness share should have nothing else stored or using that share. Within the shared folder is an .etc folder with Everyone, Unix UID=0x0, and Unix GID=0x0. All three accounts have 'special' permissions, Traverse, List, Read. I am unable to delete this folder (haven't tried to take ownership) because I don't know what the impact could be.
Is it possible that this folder is preventing the share from becoming a Witness Share?
Any other thoughts, ideas?
The client did test this in their lab, but used a file share on another Windows server rather than a NAS.