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Understanding the ADC quorum

Contributors netapp-lhalbert

You might not be able to decommission certain Storage Nodes at a data center site if too few Administrative Domain Controller (ADC) services would remain after the decommissioning. This service, which is found on some Storage Nodes, maintains grid topology information and provides configuration services to the grid. The StorageGRID system requires a quorum of ADC services to be available at each site and at all times.

You cannot decommission a Storage Node if removing the node would cause the ADC quorum to no longer be met. To satisfy the ADC quorum during a decommissioning, a minimum of three Storage Nodes at each data center site must have the ADC service. If a data center site has more than three Storage Nodes with the ADC service, a simple majority of those nodes must remain available after the decommissioning ((0.5 * Storage Nodes with ADC) + 1).

For example, suppose a data center site currently includes six Storage Nodes with ADC services and you want to decommission three Storage Nodes. Because of the ADC quorum requirement, you must complete two decommission procedures, as follows:

  • In the first decommission procedure, you must ensure that four Storage Nodes with ADC services remain available ((0.5 * 6) +1) . This means that you can only decommission two Storage Nodes initially.

  • In the second decommission procedure, you can remove the third Storage Node because the ADC quorum now only requires three ADC services to remain available ((0.5 * 4) + 1).

If you need to decommission a Storage Node but are unable to because of the ADC quorum requirement, you must add a new Storage Node in an expansion and specify that it should have an ADC service. Then, you can decommission the existing Storage Node.

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