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Witness deploy on exixting 2 node HCI

epsoft Lv1Posted 2026-Aug-14 20:51

There are several customers with old initial installation 2 node aCoud/HCI without witness node, upgraded in the years to the latest version.
From actual "Witness deployment Requirements" seems that 'If the HCI cluster have virtual storage, it need to factory reset HCI to remove virtual storage'

Most of them have large virtual storage, and removing and recreating would cause significant downtime on the production servers.

Do you plan to create a procedure in the future to add a witness without resetting the HCI?

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53632 Lv1Posted 2026-Sep-01 10:48
  
Currently, the witness node needs to be configured during the initial deployment of the virtual storage. If virtual storage has already been deployed and a witness node needs to be added afterward, the virtual storage would need to be redeployed.

For existing environments with virtual storage already in place, the recommended approach would be to first migrate the virtual machines to other available local storage or external storage. After that, the existing virtual storage can be removed and redeployed together with the witness node.

We understand that this process may involve significant operational effort and potential downtime, especially for environments with a large amount of virtual storage and production workloads.

At present, due to the underlying architecture and the technical complexity involved, there is no available procedure to directly add a witness node to an existing cluster without redeploying the virtual storage. We also do not currently have a confirmed product plan to support this scenario.

We appreciate your understanding, and we will continue to keep this requirement in consideration for future product improvements.