Does anyone know if there is a service out there that can be used as a file share witness for a Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster File share witness?
I have a two-node cluster but no good place for my file share witness – can I use the cloud?
Edit: I feel I should add some qualification to this question as it seems to have struck a nerve as several people think it is a very bad idea. Whether or not this is a good idea was not really the question as I did not provide sufficient detail of the environment for you to make such a judgement. For the benefit of others who may come across this thread, this is quite definitely not a good idea for most classic cluster installations. In the case of geographically dispersed clusters or clusters that otherwise depend on the internet in any event, this could be a compelling option if it is otherwise difficult to find a suitable location for your FSW.
As far as the general importance of the FSW goes, and what would happen if you lose connectivity to it, the answer is "not much" – as a critical component of your cluster goes, it is probably the least critical. In order for there to be any impact at all other than a few errors, at least one more component of your cluster would have to fail. I was actually innaccurate in a comment below – in this state you can failover – just not automatically. Don't get me wrong – you are definitely in a degraded state, and you don't want to be here for long or very often, but depending on your definition of "very bad things" – this would not qualify in my opinion.
The bottom line is that this might be a good idea in very specific circumstances. I marked JohnThePro's answer although I have not been able to verify whether it will work.
Best Answer
If you can, I'd recommend utilizing FreeNAS for this. If you can find MINIMAL resources anywhere on your network and setup a virtualized instance of this, you'll be able to meet the requirements of the quorum disk for your cluster.
http://www.freenas.org/
and a walkthrough for provisioning the target in FreeNAS and finding it in your cluster.
http://myownonlinekb.blogspot.com/2011/06/freenas-8-for-win2k8-r2-failover.html