StorMagic Witness on a VM in a QNAP NAS

The StorMagic Witness is used by both SvSAN and SvHCI to provide quorum when operating in a two-node cluster.

The StorMagic Witness can:

• Run remotely while tolerating up to 3000 ms of latency.
• Consume approximately 9 Kbps of bandwidth per mirror arbitrated.
• Be shared by more than 1000 remote systems.
• Operate behind NAT, allowing cloud deployment.
• Run on Ubuntu, Windows, or the StorMagicOS OVA appliance.
• Be consumed as Witness-as-a-Service provided by StorMagic.

Some environments prefer to host the Witness on-premises. The examples in this guide use a QNAP NAS running Virtualization Station to host the StorMagic Witness and optionally a Proxmox qDevice or Microsoft Windows Server Failover Cluster File Share Witness.

Log in to the QNAP NAS, open the App Center, and install Virtualization Station.

Configure a Bridge network. In this example the front-end management interface is used.

The following steps create a topology similar to the example below, utilizing an Ubuntu virtual machine on the QNAP NAS as the StorMagic Witness to provide quorum for SvHCI.

Alternatively, the Ubuntu VM can host both the StorMagic Witness for SvSAN and the Proxmox qDevice, enabling a Proxmox + SvSAN hyperconverged deployment.

In Virtualization Station, create a new virtual machine.

Provide the VM name, description, and select where the virtual machine files will be stored.

Select the virtual machine hardware. Only minimal resources are required for this use case.

Provision a small virtual disk. This guide uses a 16 GB disk to minimize storage consumption.

Connect the VM to the previously created Bridge network. This example uses the 10.40.0.0/24 infrastructure network.

Upload the operating system installation ISO to the NAS and attach it to the virtual machine.

The completed configuration will appear similar to the following:

Ensure the virtual machine is installed and configured with a static IP address before installing the StorMagic Witness.

Install the StorMagic Witness by following the guide below:

Installing the StorMagic Witness used for SvSAN 6.7 or SvHCI 2.3 to Ubuntu Linux 24.04 x64 

If utilizing SvSAN with Proxmox, install both the StorMagic Witness and the Proxmox qDevice by following the guide below:

Deploying a 2-node Witness, Proxmox and SvSAN HA Cluster - Part 3 

The following steps create a topology utilizing a Windows virtual machine on the QNAP NAS as the StorMagic Witness for SvSAN together with a File Share Witness for Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC).

Create a new virtual machine in Virtualization Station, providing the VM name, description, storage location, and operating system.

Select the required compute resources.

Allocate virtual storage. This example uses a 90 GB virtual disk with a VirtIO storage controller for optimal KVM performance.

Change the default Intel virtual network adapter to VirtIO for improved network performance.

Mount the Windows operating system installation ISO and attach an additional CD-ROM containing the VirtIO driver ISO.

Configure the virtual machine to Always Auto Start.

Review the summary and complete the virtual machine creation wizard.

During the Windows installation, select Load Driver when prompted for a storage device.

Browse to the viostor drivers located on the mounted VirtIO driver ISO.

Select Install to load the storage driver.

After the driver loads, the virtual disk becomes available for Windows installation.

Install the VirtIO Network Drivers

After Windows is installed, no network adapter will initially be available.

Open the mounted VirtIO ISO and launch the VirtIO Guest Tools installer.

Once installation completes, the network adapter becomes available.

Configure a static IP address for the virtual machine before continuing.

Download the Windows StorMagic Witness installation package from the StorMagic Support Portal.

https://support.stormagic.com 

Accept the EULA and download the installation package.

Run the installer to install the StorMagic Witness Service.

After installation completes, the StorMagic Witness service will appear in Services.msc.

This configuration provides a topology similar to the following, with Microsoft Hyper-V providing virtualization, SvSAN VSAs providing shared storage, and Windows Server Failover Clustering providing compute clustering, Live Migration, and virtual machine failover.

Configure the Windows Server File Share Witness by following the Microsoft documentation below:

File Share Witness for Windows Server Failover Clustering 

If you experience any issues, contact StorMagic Support by emailing support@stormagic.com or open a support case at https://support.stormagic.com .

• StorMagic Product Documentation