How can I obtain quorum in a Pacemaker cluster with less than or equal to half the nodes online?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • I have a 3-node cluster. node2 and node3 are shut down, and I need to run resources on node1. But node1 can't run resources because it doesn't have quorum. How do I obtain quorum?
  • Resources are stopped and the corosync-quorumtool -s command says "Activity blocked", but the pcs quorum unblock command doesn't unblock it:
[root@fastvm-rhel-7-6-21 ~]# corosync-quorumtool -s
Quorum information
------------------
Date:             Fri Jun  4 16:10:46 2021
Quorum provider:  corosync_votequorum
Nodes:            1
Node ID:          1
Ring ID:          1/247225
Quorate:          No

Votequorum information
----------------------
Expected votes:   3
Highest expected: 3
Total votes:      1
Quorum:           2 Activity blocked
Flags: 

# # RHEL 7
[root@fastvm-rhel-7-6-21 ~]# pcs quorum unblock
Error: cluster is not waiting for nodes to establish quorum

# # RHEL 8
[root@fastvm-rhel-8-0-23 ~]# pcs quorum unblock
Error: unable to check quorum status

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (with the High Availability Add-on)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (with the High Availability Add-on)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (with the High Availability Add-on)

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