Network & Infrastructure / Storage Networks & Distributed Data
Monitor quorum during a storage-network partition
A partition leaves some Ceph monitors reachable from clients but unable to form quorum. Mere process health or ping reachability does not establish that cluster control decisions can proceed.
Environment and inputs: Ceph and storage transport dependencies; match health identifiers and recovery behavior to the installed release. Diagnostic/design example; not tested on production equipment.
Collect the evidence
Record monitor membership, quorum participants, partition boundaries and client connectivity to each monitor address. Separate monitor control traffic from OSD data traffic in the dependency map.
Explain the result
Quorum requires agreement among enough members of the configured group. Independent reachability to a minority side cannot substitute for that agreement and can mislead a simplistic health dashboard.
Plan the fix
Restore the intended monitor communication or follow the release-specific quorum recovery procedure. Avoid creating competing control groups or improvising membership changes without authoritative state.
Check the result and rollback
Verify stable quorum and client discovery after recovery, then test the designed single-failure case. Revert topology changes if monitors remain split or the surviving group loses its required independence.