Invalid Quorum Configuration Warnings when failing over SQL Server Availability Group

At a client site today and they asked me about a warning that they got every time they manually failed over their SQL Server availability group.

It said: “The current WSFC cluster quorum vote configuration is not recommended for the availability group.” They were puzzled by this as they had a valid quorum configuration. In their case, they had a two node cluster using MNS (majority node set) and a fileshare witness.

The problem with that message is that it is returned when the node voting weight is not visible.

Windows Server 2008 failover clustering introduced node-based voting but later an option was provided to adjust the voting weight for each node. If the cluster is based on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2, and KB2494036 has not been applied, even though each node has a vote, the utilities that check voting weight are not supplied a weight value. You can see this by querying:

SELECT * FROM sys.dm_hadr_cluster_members;

This will return a row for each cluster member but will have a missing vote weight.

Applying the KB hotfix will make this DMV return the correct values, and will make this invalid warning disappear.

2014-12-22