The attributes Authority and AutoStart work together to avoid potential concurrency violations in multi-cluster configurations.

If the AutoStartList attribute is set, and if a group's Authority attribute is set to 1, the VCS engine waits for the wac process to connect to the peer. If the connection fails, it means the peer is down and the AutoStart process proceeds. If the connection succeeds, HAD waits for the remote snapshot. If the peer is holding the authority for the group and the remote group is online (because of takeover), the local cluster does not bring the group online and relinquishes authority.

If the Authority attribute is set to 0, AutoStart is not invoked.