During a recent engagement my client had a requirement for a high-availability Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 environment. This entailed configuring an active/passive Root Management Server cluster. The question came up, can we use a SAN-free File Share Witness (FSW) like Exchange 2007 CCR or must we use a shared SAN quorum disk?
As it turns out, using a File Share Witness MAY work with SCOM 2007, but is NOT a Microsoft supported configuration. Thus if you encounter any problems using a FSW quorum, you are on your own and may need to rebuild the cluster using shared disks. So for now, use the legacy SAN method of shared storage for the quorum and your RMS cluster.
Hopefully in a future service pack Microsoft will test and officially support FSW cluster model. However, remember the RMS cluster still needs a separate shared disk cluster resource to store health state information. I will write a future blog about sizing this cluster resource.
For more information on what a File Share Witness is, see this link.
