We are proposing a following setup for a ERP backend Server on SQL server 2014
- 3 Node WSFC cluster on windows 2012 R2 Standard ( virtual hosts on VMWare) , all 3 nodes residing in same data centers
- Node 1 and Node 2 have shared storage for AlwaysOn FCI
- 3 rd Node has a non –shared storage and will be used as secondary asynchronous replica for the DBs on Primary ( residing on Node 1 and Node 2) using Availability groups
- 3rd node does not participate in Quorum voting hence nodeWeight is set to 0
- Quorum Mode currently is node and Disk Majority , witness disk is a shared Disk between Node 1 and Node 2
- Witness disk is a RDM mapped on Node 1 and Node 2 , but not on Node 3 , Cluster validation works fine and since 3rd node does not participate , automatic failover between 2 nodes of FCI is flawless with witness disk failing back and forth.
my question is is this architecture valid or do I need to have the witness disk as clustered Shared volume ( CSV ) with 3rd node as well ?