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How Failover Works

Failover is the process of having cluster resources migrate (or transfer) from an unavailable node to an available node. Failover is automatically initiated when a failure is detected on one of the cluster nodes. The cluster monitors resources to determine when a failure has occurred and then takes action to recover from the failure by moving the clustered resource(s) to another node in the cluster.

In a Arcserve Backup HA cluster environment, Arcserve Backup is installed in each cluster node, but only one instance will be running. In this cluster, the active node will automatically take control of the backup resources and is referred to as the backup server. Other instances of Arcserve Backup that are hosted in a passive node are referred as the standby (or failover) server and the cluster system will only activate one of them in case of failover. If the active node fails, then all backup resources will migrate to a passive node, which then becomes the new active node. The new active node begins to function as the backup server, and continues the original backup operations and maintains all previous job scheduling and media management services.

Arcserve Backup provides the following types of failover protection: