Retrieve the UNC path used as a cluster fileshare witness

[mrahman-DBA]

Summarize Functionality

I have tried the below windows cluster commands but I can’t seem to retrieve the UNC path that is used as a fileshare witness. Unless I am missing something, I am requesting that the fileshare path is retrieved for a fileshare witness

Get-DbaWsfcCluster
Get-DbaWsfcNode
Get-DbaWsfcResource

Is there a command that is similiar or close to what you are looking for?

Yes

Technical Details

No response

[andreasjordan]

Thanks for the report — the good news is the path is already retrievable today, it's just buried.

I configured a temporary file share witness on a lab cluster (Windows Server 2025, cluster functional level 12) and queried it with the current development code:

Get-DbaWsfcResource -ComputerName cluster02 |
    Where-Object Type -eq "File Share Witness" |
    Select-Object -ExpandProperty PrivateProperties

ArbitrationDelay : 6
ImpersonateCNO   : 1
Password         :
SharePath        : \\sql01\dbatoolsci_fsw
UserName         :

So as a one-liner:

(Get-DbaWsfcResource -ComputerName cluster02 | Where-Object Type -eq "File Share Witness").PrivateProperties.SharePath

Why the three commands you tried came up empty:

• Get-DbaWsfcResource does return the File Share Witness resource, but SharePath lives in the PrivateProperties bag of the WMI MSCluster_Resource instance, and that property is not in the default view. It only shows up with Select-Object * or by expanding it as above.
• Get-DbaWsfcCluster | Select-Object QuorumPath is the obvious place to look, and it is genuinely empty for a file share witness. I verified both ways on the same lab: with a disk witness QuorumPath returns Q:\Cluster\, and after switching to a file share witness it stayed empty while only QuorumType changed to Node and File Share Majority. So that is a disk-witness-only property, not something dbatools is dropping.
• Get-DbaWsfcNode never carried witness information.

On the feature request itself — agreed that this should be discoverable rather than requiring you to know about PrivateProperties. The cluster WMI namespace has an MSCluster_ClusterToQuorumResource association that returns the quorum resource directly (it returned File Share Witness on the FSW cluster and Cluster Disk Quorum on the disk-witness one), so Get-DbaWsfcCluster could reasonably gain the quorum resource name plus the witness path from it. That is a maintainer call on scope.

created by Claude and reviewed by Andreas Jordan

[mrahman-DBA]

Thank you, I am able to retrieve the path now. As you said, it would be great to surface the path more easily

[andreasjordan]

I'm going to upgrade my lab over the next few days and then continue working on it.