Method and system to enable high availability "three-site" applications using only two sites

A method, comprising:

• provide a cluster including a plurality of nodes distributed over a first computing site and a second computing site configured as a two-site stretched cluster, wherein the cluster having network resources including network storage and configured with a virtualized environment;
• monitoring a compute and memory resources of the plurality of nodes;
• determining, from the plurality of nodes, a witness node that uses less compute and memory resources relative to the other nodes in the plurality of nodes;
• creating a mirrored storage between the first and second computing sites and moving the witness node into the mirrored storage;
• determine, based on the witness node, an active node and a passive node in the plurality of nodes, wherein no pair of the active, passive, and witness nodes are the same node, and wherein the active node is, at least initially, at the first computing site and the
• passive node is at the second computing site;
• and
• running a high-availability application on the active node and replicating the active node to the passive node.