Starting the Failover Manager Cluster

You can start the nodes of a Failover Manager cluster in any order.

To start the Failover Manager cluster on RHEL 6.x or CentOS 6.x, assume superuser privileges, and invoke the command:

service efm-3.6 start

To start the Failover Manager cluster on RHEL 7.x or CentOS 7.x, assume superuser privileges, and invoke the command:

systemctl start efm-3.6

If the cluster properties file for the node specifies that is.witness is true, the node will start as a Witness node.

If the node is not a dedicated Witness node, Failover Manager will connect to the local database and invoke the pg_is_in_recovery() function. If the server responds false, the agent assumes the node is a Master node, and assigns a virtual IP address to the node (if applicable). If the server responds true, the Failover Manager agent assumes that the node is a Standby server. If the server does not respond, the agent will start in an idle state.

After joining the cluster, the Failover Manager agent checks the supplied database credentials to ensure that it can connect to all of the databases within the cluster. If the agent cannot connect, the agent will shut down.

If a new master or standby node joins a cluster, all of the existing nodes will also confirm that they can connect to the database on the new node.