FLEXIBLE FAILOVER POLICIES IN HIGH AVAILABILITY COMPUTING SYSTEMS

• US 20110214007A1
• Filed: 09/27/2010
• Published: 09/01/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 03/16/2000
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC (Sony Group Corp.)
• Original Assignee: Silicon Graphics Incorporated (Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc.)
• Inventors: Nishimoto, Michael, Pramanick, Ira, Verma, Manish, Bradshaw, Robert David, Dandapani, Ajit, Castellano, Luca, Sreenivasan, Padmanabhan, Mallena, Raghu
• Granted Patent: US 8,769,132 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 714/4.11
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2023 Failover techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2033 switching over of hardware resources
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/805 Real-time
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/40 for recovering from a failure of a protocol instance or entity, e.g. service redundancy protocols, protocol state redundancy or protocol service redirection management of faults, events, alarms or notifications in data switching networks H04L41/06

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.

Claims

1. A system for implementing a failover policy comprising:

a cluster infrastructure for managing a plurality of nodes arranged as one or more clusters;

a high availability infrastructure for providing group and cluster membership services, wherein the high availability infrastructure defines a plurality of resource groups, wherein each resource group includes two or more interdependent resources; and

a high availability script execution component operative to receive a failover script and at least one failover attribute and to produce a failover domain, wherein the failover domain is a list of nodes from the plurality of nodes on which a given resource group can be allocated;

wherein the high availability script execution component selects a target node on receipt of notification of failure of a node and as a function of the failover domain, the failover attributes and the failover script.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the one or more resources includes an application and further comprising an application plug-in that provides a high-availability interface for the application.

2. A method for determining a target node for a failover, comprising:

executing a failover script, said script producing a failover domain, said 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.

4. The method of claim 2, wherein selecting a node comprises selecting a first node in the ordered list of nodes.

5. A system for implementing a failover policy comprising:

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 upon the detection of a failover event to perform the tasks of;

receiving a failover script comprising a set of one or more commands and further operable to receive at least one failover attribute and operative to cause the failover script to be interpreted to produce a run-time failover domain from an initial failover domain, wherein the run-time failover domain is an ordered list of nodes on which resources can be allocated; and

executing one or more action scripts, the action scripts, when executed, causing a resource group having one or more resources to failover to a node selected from the ordered list of nodes in the run-time failover domain.

6. The system of claim 5, wherein the failover event comprises failure of a node.

7. The system of claim 5, wherein the failover event comprises a load-balancing event independent of node failure.

8. The system of claim 5, wherein the one or more resources includes an application and further comprising an application plug-in that provides a high-availability interface for the application.

9. A method for configuring nodes in a cluster, comprising:

defining a plurality of resource groups, wherein each resource group is a collection of interdependent resources; and

defining, for each resource group, a failover policy for that group, wherein the failover policy includes a failover domain, one or more failover attributes and a failover script, wherein the failover domain is an ordered list of nodes in the cluster on which a particular resource group can be allocated;

detecting a failover event;

upon detecting the failover event, executing a failover script, said script comprising a set of one or more commands that when executed determine a run-time failover domain from an initial failover domain associated with a particular resource group;

receiving a failover attribute;

based on the failover attribute and run-time failover domain, selecting a node upon which to allocate the particular resource group; and

executing one or more action scripts, the action scripts causing the resource group to failover to the selected node.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein selecting a node comprises selecting a first node in the ordered list of nodes.

11. The method of claim 9, wherein the action script verifies that the resource is configured on the target node.

12. The method of claim 9, wherein the action script verifies that the resource is not already running on the target node.

13. The method of claim 9, wherein the failover event comprises failure of a node.

14. The method of claim 9, wherein the failover event comprises a load balancing event independent of node failure.

15. The method of claim 9, further comprising:

saving the run-time failover domain;

detecting a second failover event; and

executing the failover script upon detection of the second failover event, wherein the run-time failover domain is provided as input to the failover script and further wherein the failover script determines a second run-time failover domain.