Component lease failover

In the course of standard cluster operation, meaning no network issues, no lost cluster members or similar problems, PolicyCenter periodically and automatically renews all component leases. Thus, the expiration of a lease is an exceptional condition that requires attention. If a component lease expires, PolicyCenter considers the owner of that lease to have failed. To detect this situation, the cluster lease managers periodically search for expired leases and initiate failover of the expired lease to another member of the cluster.

After a lease manager detects an expired lease, it does the following:

It terminates the lease.
It updates the lease history.
It deletes the lease or recreates the lease for acquisition by another cluster member, depending on the type of the lease.

Automatic and manual failover

Guidewire PolicyCenter supports both automatic and manual failover of a component lease from one cluster member to another member of the cluster. However, there are situations in which an automatic component failover is not desirable, for example:

There is a need for further additional configuration of an external third-party product before it is possible to start a destination or plugin on a different computer.
There is a need for further diagnostic testing to determine the exact cause of failure before initiating the failover process.