Occasionally, the witness appliance may show an "expired" license. Note that the witness appliance comes with a built-in OEM license. If this fails, consider upgrading via vSphere Lifecycle Manager.
This guide has provided you with the steps to locate, download, deploy, and configure your appliance, as well as critical best practices to avoid common pitfalls. Following these procedures will ensure your vSAN stretched cluster has a reliable and robust witness to maintain high availability.
The latency between the witness host and the two-node cluster must be within limits (typically download vsan witness appliance
Requires a Witness Appliance to act as the second node's partner.
This article was last updated to reflect the current VMware by Broadcom download structure. Product interfaces change, but the logical path remains consistent. Occasionally, the witness appliance may show an "expired"
: Click the download button for the OVA file to save it to your local system. Essential Pre-Deployment Notes
: During deployment, you must choose a size (Tiny, Medium, or Large) based on the number of virtual machines in your cluster. This guide has provided you with the steps
The vSAN Witness Appliance is a virtual appliance that provides witness components for VMware vSAN Stretched Cluster and 2-node vSAN configurations. It runs a lightweight ESXi-based appliance (OVA/VM) that hosts witness VMs used for quorum and metadata voting so that vSAN can tolerate failures and avoid split-brain scenarios.
While downloading, check your “Licensing” section. Sometimes the Witness appliance requires a separate license key (though generally, it uses the vSAN ROBO license). Have your keys ready before deployment.
Select the appropriate variant: or Express Storage Architecture (ESA) , depending on your cluster's configuration.