3PAR – no connection to quorum witness

Recently I had problems to connect a 3PAR system to a quorum appliance. Quorum is needed in a Peer Persistence configuration. The system had a connection to the quorum. After HPE support did replace a node, connection could not be established any more.

Command showcropy -qw shows error “below min safe num QAs” and other errors talking about QAs. In SSMC quorum was stated as “Initializing”. When testing connection to quorum using command setrcopytarget witness check witness_ip error “No route to Quorum Witness at witness_ip” was shown. I needed some time to figure out, QAs are Quorum Announcers. On every node such process tries to connect to quorum. When testing each node, using setrcopytarget witness check -remote -node 0|1 witness_ip error like “Error: node 0|1 is not registered” appears. Solution that worked for me was to restart both nodes using shutdownnode reboot 0|1. It should be clear to reboot one node after the other. Check successful reboot using shownode, when first node is back in cluster, reboot second node. It should also be clear, to reboot nodes when no performance problems are expected (new or empty system, CPU usage <50%, AFA, consider settings system parameter AllowWrtbackSingleNode to continue using write cache during reboot).