When the primary cluster for a protection group fails, the secondary cluster in the partnership detects the failure. The cluster that fails might be a member of more than one partnership, resulting in multiple failure detections.
The following actions take place when a primary cluster failure occurs. During a failure, the appropriate protection groups are in the Unknown state on the cluster that failed.
Heartbeat failure is detected by a partner cluster.
The heartbeat is activated in emergency mode to verify that the heartbeat loss is not transient and that the primary cluster has failed. The heartbeat remains in the Online state during this default time-out interval, while the heartbeat mechanism continues to retry the primary cluster.
This query interval is set by using the Query_interval heartbeat property. If the heartbeat still fails after the interval you configured, a heartbeat-lost event is generated and logged in the system log. When you use the default interval, the emergency-mode retry behavior might delay heartbeat-loss notification for about nine minutes. Messages are displayed in the graphical user interface (GUI) and in the output of the geoadm status command.
For more information about logging, see Viewing the Geographic Edition Log Messages.
If the partnership is configured for heartbeat-loss notification, then one or both of the following actions occurs:
An email is sent to the address specified in the Notification_emailaddrs property.
The script defined in Notification_actioncmd is executed.
For more information about configuring heartbeat-loss notification, see Configuring Heartbeat-Loss Notification.