Deploying the 3PAR Quorum Witness VM

In my previous post I gave an overview on Peer Persistence and how to set it up. One of the tasks in the setup of Peer Persistence is the deployment of the quorum witness VM and this will be the focus of today’s post.

 

The instructions for deploying the witness VM are in the HPE Remote Copy Software User Guide on page 313. The instructions are thorough until you get to step 13 where it says “Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 to comment out (or delete) the PREFIX line, so that the netmask change can take effect:” but yet gives no instructions on how to do it. The witness VM is based on Cent OS and I am sure this step will be no bother to our Linux loving friends but as a Windows lover I was lost, shouting at the screen and demanding a GUI did no good. So I then did the following to change the mysterious ifcfg-eth0.

1 Connect to your witness VM via console and logon (root plus the password you chose)

2 Change directory

cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/

3 Enter

vi ifcfg-eth0

4 Locate where it says PREFIX, press i on the keyboard to allow insert and enter

##

5 To save your changes press escape on the keyboard, then type :wq! and finally press enter

6 Restart the management network

service network restart

7 That’s the end of the missing steps you can now return to HPE’s steps in the Remote Copy guide

 

Checking the witness VM

 

Once deployed that are a couple of CLI options you can use to check the health of the quorum witness VM.

showrcopy -qw targets
setrcopytarget witness check <IP of Quorum Witness>

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