HP Serviceguard manual No Arbitration-Risks

Arbitration for Data Integrity in Serviceguard Clusters

To Arbitrate or Not to Arbitrate

No Arbitration—Risks

When all is said and done, it may be very unlikely that intra-node communication would be lost in the above configurations, but it is still possible that heartbeat could disappear, with both nodes still running, and this scenario can cause data corruption.

The risk of split brain syndrome is considerably greater with extended distance clusters and disaster tolerant solutions in which nodes are located in different data centers at some distance from each other. For these types of solution, some form of arbitration is essential.

The unlikely but possible scenario of split brain can be definitively avoided with an arbitration device. In other words, the risk of data corruption can be eliminated. The HP Serviceguard family of clustering software includes this level of protection.

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