Hotspot Question You plan to deploy an Always On failover cluster instance (FCI) on Azure virtual machines. You need to provision an Azure Storage account to host a cloud witness for the deployment…

Question

Exhibit

Answer Area

• Type:
  Premium block blobsPremium file sharesStandard general-purpose v2
• Replication:
  Geo-redundant storage (GRS)Locally-redundant storage (LRS)Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)

Explanation

This question tests knowledge of Azure Storage account configuration requirements for hosting a Cloud Witness used in Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) with Always On Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) on Azure VMs.

Approach. A Cloud Witness for WSFC requires an Azure Storage account configured with the following settings: Account Kind should be 'StorageV2 (general purpose v2)' or 'Storage (general purpose v1)' - NOT Blob storage, as the Cloud Witness uses Azure Blob storage internally but requires a general-purpose account. Replication should be set to 'Locally-redundant storage (LRS)' because geo-redundant replication is unnecessary and not recommended for a quorum witness - the witness only needs to be available within the region, and LRS provides the lowest cost with sufficient durability. The storage account does NOT require geo-redundancy (GRS/RA-GRS) since the cluster quorum mechanism itself handles failover decisions. Performance tier should be 'Standard' as Premium storage is not required for the minimal I/O needs of a Cloud Witness.

Concept tested. Configuring an Azure Storage Account as a Cloud Witness for Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) used with SQL Server Always On FCI on Azure Virtual Machines - specifically understanding account kind (general-purpose v2), replication type (LRS), and performance tier (Standard) requirements.

Reference. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/failover-clustering/deploy-cloud-witness

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