Flexible failover policies in high availability computing systems

Abstract

A system for implementing a failover policy includes a cluster infrastructure for managing a plurality of nodes, a high availability infrastructure for providing group and cluster membership services, and a high availability script execution component operative to receive a failover script and at least one failover attribute and operative to produce a failover domain. In addition, a method for determining a target node for a failover comprises executing a failover script that produces a failover domain, the failover domain having an ordered list of nodes, receiving a failover attribute and based on the failover attribute and failover domain, selecting a node upon which to locate a resource.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A method for providing failover policies, the method comprising:
 executing instructions stored in memory by a processor, wherein the executed instructions:
 detect a failover event associated with an initial node, wherein the detected failover event includes identifying a node failure and a resource associated with the initial node, 
 execute a failover script based on the detected failover event, 
   wherein the executed failover script outputs an ordered list of alternative nodes to which a resource associated with the initial node can be reallocated,
 receive failover attributes associated with the ordered list of alternative nodes, wherein the received failover attributes specifies how a particular resource can be reallocated, and 
 identify a target replacement node from the ordered list of alternative nodes using the received failover attributes, wherein the identified target replacement node is used to reallocate the resource associated with the initial node using the received failover attributes; and 
   re-allocating the resource associated with the initial node onto the identified target replacement node.