Dell PowerVault 775N (Rackmount NAS Appliance) - Manual (Page 18)

Table 1-9. Example of a Four-Node Multiway Failover Configuration
Cluster Resource Group Failover Order in the Preferred Owners List
A Node 1
B Node 2
C Node 3
D Node 4
E Node 5
F Node 6
Failover Ring
Failover ring is an active/active failover policy where all running applications migrate from the failed node to the next
preassigned cluster node in the Preferred Owners List in Cluster Administrator. If the failing node is the last node in the list,
the failed node's resources failover to the first node in the list.
While this type of failover solution provides high resource availability to users, you must ensure that the cluster node next in
line for failover has ample resources available to handle the additional workload of the failed node.
Figure 1-6 shows an example of a failover ring configuration.
Figure 1-6. Example of a Four-Node Failover Ring Configuration
Overview
Table 1-10 provides an overview of the failover policies implemented with Windows Storage Server 2003, Enterprise Edition.
Table 1-10. Windows Storage Server 2003, Enterprise Edition Failover Policies
Failover
Policy
Description Advantage Disadvantage(s)
N + I One or more servers provides
backup for multiple servers in
the cluster.
Highest resource
availability.
May not handle more than one backup server
failure
May not fully utilize all of the servers
Failover
pair
Applications can failover
between the two nodes in the
cluster.
Easy to plan the
server capacity of
each node.
Half of the server resources are idle.
Multiway Running applications migrate
to multiple nodes in the
Application load
balancing.
Must ensure that the failover cluster nodes have ample
resources available to handle the additional workload.