Purpose

This document will delineate the steps necessary to work around a situation where your Proxmox cluster will not allow you to interact with it due to lack of quorum between the hosts.

Assumptions

This document assumes that the nodes in the cluster are all online with proper certificates, network connectivity, and that the administrator intents to properly resolve the quorum issue following these steps.

This guide is not intended to be a permanent solution, but rather a work-around.

Cause

This occurs when the cluster quorum is not configured correctly –or– when a cluster member is offline. The intended function of the cluster is to not work if the quorum does not receive the adequate number of votes from the cluster to begin. You can manually set the number of expected quorum.

Step 1 – Override expected number of quorum votes

You can manually set the number of expected quorum votes by running this command:

pvecm expected #

where # is the number of votes you wish to make the quorum use to determine if the cluster is quorate.

Only manually override this if the node that is offline is about to be deleted from the cluster.

Following use of this command, the cluster should achieve quorum and allow you to interact with it. It is recommended that you remove the problem node from the cluster following the procedure.