Initiating a Manual Redundancy Group Failover

You can initiate a failover manually with the request command. A manual failover bumps up the priority of the redundancy group for that member to 255.

After a manual failover, the new primary device continues in that role until there is a failback. If there is a failback, the manual failover is lost and state election is made based on priority and preempt settings. A failback in manual failover mode can occur if the primary node fails or if the threshold of a redundancy group 0 reaches 0.

Caution: Be cautious and judicious in your use of redundancy group 0 manual failovers. A redundancy group 0 failover implies a Routing Engine (RE) failover, in which case all processes running on the primary node are killed and then spawned on the new primary Routing Engine (RE). This failover could result in loss of state, such as routing state, and degrade performance by introducing system churn.

This topic includes:

• CLI Configuration

CLI Configuration

Use the show command to display the status of nodes in the cluster:

Cluster ID: 3
Node name                  Priority     Status    Preempt  Manual failover

Redundancy group: 0 , Failover count: 0
    node0                   254         primary   no       no
    node1                   2           secondary no       no

Output to this command indicates that node 0 is primary.

Use the request command to trigger a failover and make node 1 primary:

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Initiated manual failover for redundancy group 0

Use the show command to display the new status of nodes in the cluster.

Cluster ID: 1
    Node name              Priority     Status        Preempt  Manual failover

Redundancy-group: 0, Failover count: 1
    node0                  254          secondary     no       yes 
    node1                  2            primary       no       yes

Output to this command shows that node 1 is now primary.

You can reset the failover for redundancy groups by using the request command. This change is propagated across the cluster.

node0:
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Successfully reset manual failover for redundancy group 1
node1:
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With back-to-back failovers, after doing a manual failover, you must issue the reset failover command before requesting another failover.

When the primary node fails and comes back up, election of the primary node is done based on regular criteria (priority and preempt).