Witness Client failed to find a Witness Server

Question

I am having a lot of critical event on all servers 2012r2 which connect to our isilon_cluster storage.

Witness Client failed to find a Witness Server for NetName \\isilon_cluster with error (Element not found.). Retrying in (15) seconds.

I have no idea where to start looking into this issue, is there something setup wrong on storage or something on the server side?

Solution

You seem to have SMB server configured in cluster mode with the SMB shares set as continuously available. In this case, the SMB client talks to 'witness server' which should be running on the SMB server node. Microsoft SMB2/3 server implements continuous availability of shares using witness protocol. The witness server provides information of other nodes on which the shares will be available in case of node failure.

Comments

[Root Loop]

Good information, I will take a look.