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| Lost heartbeats and the inquiry mechanism | ||
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The loss of internal and all external heartbeats between any two clusters indicates that the remote cluster is faulted, or that all communication links between the two clusters are broken (a wide-area split-brain).
VCS queries clusters to confirm the remote cluster to which heartbeats have been lost is truly down. This mechanism is referred to as inquiry. If in a two-cluster configuration a connector loses all heartbeats to the other connector, it must consider the remote cluster faulted. If there are more than two clusters and a connector loses all heartbeats to a second cluster, it queries the remaining connectors before declaring the cluster faulted. If the other connectors view the cluster as running, the querying connector transitions the cluster to the unknown state, a process that minimizes false cluster faults. If all connectors report that the cluster is faulted, the querying connector also considers it faulted and transitions the remote cluster state to faulted.