Flexible failover policies in high availability computing systems

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.

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.

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.