I think the majority of people do not use ssh fencing at all. The reason for this is that Namenode HA works fine without it. The only issue can be that during a network partitioning old connections to the old standby might still exist and get stale old date during read-only operations. - They cannot do any write transactions since the Journalnode majority prohibits that - Normally if zkfc works correctly an active namenode will not go into zombie mode, he is dead or not. So the chances of a split brain are low and the impact is pretty limited. If you use ssh fencing the important part is that your script cannot block other wise the failover will be stopped, you need to have all scripts return in a sensible amount of time even if the access is not possible. Fencing by definition is always an attempt. Since most of the time the node is simply down. And they need to return success in the end. So you need a fork with a timeout and then return true. https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.7.1/hadoop-project-dist/hadoop-hdfs/HDFSHighAvailabilityWithQJM.html#Verifying_automatic_failover ... View more