How to set Pacemaker quorum policy

Quorum policy determines how a Pacemaker cluster reacts when a partition loses quorum, such as during node failures or network splits. Choosing the right behavior balances availability against the risk of running services without a clear majority.

In most Linux clusters, Corosync tracks membership and quorum while Pacemaker schedules resource actions based on that quorum state. The cluster-wide no-quorum-policy property defines the action to take when a partition is not quorate, and it is stored in the cluster configuration (CIB) managed through pcs.

Relaxed policies like ignore can keep services online but increase split-brain risk when fencing (STONITH) is missing, broken, or slow. Conservative policies like stop or freeze reduce that risk by halting resources or preventing recovery in non-quorate partitions, at the cost of downtime after failures. Two-node clusters are a special case where quorum design (quorum device or policy selection) must be deliberate to avoid both nodes trying to serve the same workload.

Steps to set Pacemaker quorum policy:

Display cluster properties to confirm the current no-quorum-policy value.

$ sudo pcs property config
Cluster Properties: cib-bootstrap-options
  cluster-infrastructure=corosync
  cluster-name=clustername
  dc-version=2.1.6-6fdc9deea29
  have-watchdog=false
  stonith-enabled=false

Some pcs versions accept pcs property show no-quorum-policy as a shorter query.

Select the target no-quorum-policy value based on the cluster design.
Common no-quorum-policy values:
- stop - Stop all resources in a partition without quorum.
- freeze - Keep current resource state, but avoid recovering resources from nodes outside the partition.
- ignore - Continue resource management without quorum.
Some Pacemaker versions also provide values such as demote, fence, or suicide for promotable resources and fencing behavior.
Set the no-quorum-policy cluster property to the chosen value.
```
$ sudo pcs property set no-quorum-policy=freeze
```
Setting no-quorum-policy=ignore can allow split-brain and data corruption when fencing fails or is disabled.

Restore the default value by clearing the property with sudo pcs property set no-quorum-policy=.

Re-check cluster properties for the updated no-quorum-policy value.

$ sudo pcs property config
Cluster Properties: cib-bootstrap-options
  cluster-infrastructure=corosync
  cluster-name=clustername
  dc-version=2.1.6-6fdc9deea29
  have-watchdog=false
  no-quorum-policy=freeze
  stonith-enabled=false

Check quorum runtime status after the change.

$ sudo pcs quorum status
Quorum information
------------------
Date:             Wed Dec 31 12:07:51 2025
Quorum provider:  corosync_votequorum
Nodes:            3
Node ID:          1
Ring ID:          1.3d
Quorate:          Yes

Votequorum information
----------------------
Expected votes:   3
Highest expected: 3
Total votes:      3
Quorum:           2
Flags:            Quorate

Membership information
----------------------
    Nodeid      Votes    Qdevice Name
         1          1         NR node-01 (local)
         2          1         NR node-02
         3          1         NR node-03