Download articleI get asked this question all the time. People are concerned about losing their file share witness, so like many of their other shares, they want to leverage DFS for some additional availability. This is a very bad idea and is not supported.
Microsoft recently publish a great blog article that describes exactly why this is not supported.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/clustering/2018/04/13/failover-cluster-file-share-witness-and-dfs/
Much of this article would also apply to people who ask if they can use a DataKeeper replicated volume resource as a Disk Share. It makes sense, you can use a DataKeeper volume resource in place of a Physical Disk resource for any other workload, so why not a Disk Witness?
This issue is the same as the DFS issue, in the event of a loss of communication between the two servers there is nothing to guarantee that the volume wouldn’t come online on both servers, causing a potential split-brain condition. The Physical Disk resource overcomes this issue by using SCSI reservations, ensuring the disk is only accessible by one cluster node at a time.
The good news is that Microsoft already blocks you from trying to us a replicated DataKeeper Volume resource and coming in Windows Server 2019 it looks like they will also block you from using a DFS share as a File Share Witness.
