Zookeeper failure handling in Kafka

[Neeraj Vaidya <ne...@yahoo.co.in.INVALID>]

Hi All,
If I have a 5 node zookeeper ensemble backing my 5 node Kafka cluster and if more than 2 of the zookeeper nodes shutdown, Kafka producer clients are still able to write to Kafka without any issues.

Is this normal behaviour ?

I always thought that zookeeper quorum should be available for the Kafka cluster to function. ( I also believed that zookeeper service will be unavailable if more than the majority goes down, but maybe I will ask that in a zookeeper forum).

When will Kafka producer clients start experiencing issues when producing messages to Kafka, in case of an entire Zookeeper cluster not being available ? (Assume that the zookeeper cluster was up and running when the kafka cluster and the kafka clients started, but went down sometime later).

Regards,
Neeraj