Failfast

The purpose of failfast is to halt a component that is not healthy enough to continue correct operations. Sun Cluster software includes many failfast mechanisms that detect different unhealthy conditions.

If the Sun Cluster system detects a critical failure on the global-cluster voting node, the system forcibly shuts down the Solaris host.

When the Sun Cluster system detects a critical failure on any other type of node, for example, a global-cluster non-voting node or zone-cluster node, the system reboots that node.

Sun Cluster software monitors the nodes that belong to the cluster. Communication or node failures can change the number of nodes in a cluster. If the cluster does not maintain sufficient votes, Sun Cluster software halts that set of nodes.

Sun Cluster software maintains a number of critical cluster-specific daemons. Some daemons support the global-cluster voting node, while others support other types of nodes. A daemon is critical to the node that the daemon supports, which might differ from the node on which the daemon runs. For example, some daemons in the global zone support a non-global zone. For this reason, these daemons are critical to the health of the non-global zone rather than the global zone.