Add SMB Witness to Existing 2-Node vSAN

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FireMedic
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue May 25, 2021 4:04 pm

Mon Mar 24, 2025 2:46 am

I have a 2-node Hyper-V vSAN (paid so I have the GUI). I am upgrading servers so I'm migrating one of the nodes to new hardware. One of the vSAN devices looks like it doesn't have the SMB witness configured (shutting down one node causes the vSAN storage to stop and go unsynchronized on both). Checking the HA.swdsk files for the this vSAN device does not have any storage info for the SMB Witness (unlike the other vSAN device I have in this vSAN cluster) and the "Witness_type" shows "0". I'm thinking that I didn't have the SMB witness configured all this time and I'd like to rectify this.
I found the "CreateHASmbWitness.ps1" script but I'm unclear on a few things after reading the documentation. It almost seems like this script is for creating a new vSAN cluster and not modifying an existing one.

Will this script work on an existing vSAN or only for a new one?

Under the Primary/Secondary node configuration in the script:
-"imagePath" this should point to the existing storage location for the .img files on the two nodes?
-"imageName" should this be the .img file name?
-"createImage" the documentation says this should be set to "$true" however, these are existing nodes so is that still the case? I certainly don't want to overwrite the .img files!
-"targetAlias" where do I find the correct value to go here?
yaroslav (staff)
Staff
Posts: 3424
Joined: Mon Nov 18, 2019 11:11 am

Mon Mar 24, 2025 12:00 pm

Hi,

You do not need to reconfigure the SMB witness when you recreate the replica. If you want to convert heartbeat -> SMB witness that is trickier as the script refers to the new device creation rather than modifying the properties of the existing device.
P.s. if you have UI and an active support contract, the Support team will be happy to help.
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