9.4 Configuring Quorum Membership and Timeout Policies

The quorum membership and timeout properties govern when cluster resources begin loading on cluster startup, failback, or failover.

In iManager, select Clusters > My Clusters.
Select the check box of the cluster that you want to manage.

If the cluster does not appear in your list, add the cluster to your list as described in Section 9.2, Setting Up a Personalized List of Clusters to Manage.
Select Action > Edit Properties to open the Properties dialog box.
Click the Policies tab.
Under Quorum Triggers, specify the number of nodes that are required to form a quorum for the specified cluster.

See Section 9.4.1, Quorum Membership (Number of Nodes).
Under Quorum Triggers, specify the amount of time in seconds to wait for the quorum to form before beginning to load the cluster resources without a quorum being formed.

See Section 9.4.2, Quorum Timeout.
Click Apply or OK to save your changes.
Restart Cluster Services. Open a terminal console as the root user, then enter the following at the command prompt:
```
rcnovell-ncs restart
```

9.4.1 Quorum Membership (Number of Nodes)

A cluster quorum is the number of nodes that must be running in the cluster before resources begin to load. When you first bring up servers in your cluster, Novell Cluster Services reads the number specified in this field and waits until that number of servers is up and running in the cluster before it starts loading resources.

Set this value to a number greater than 1 so that all resources do not automatically load on the first server that is brought up in the cluster. For example, if you set the Number of Nodes value to 4, there must be four servers up in the cluster before any resource loads and starts.

9.4.2 Quorum Timeout

Timeout specifies the amount of time to wait for the number of servers defined in the Number of Nodes field to be up and running. If the timeout period elapses before the quorum membership reaches its specified number, resources automatically start loading on the servers that are currently up and running in the cluster. For example, if you specify a Number of Nodes value of 4 and a timeout value equal to 30 seconds, and after 30 seconds only two servers are up and running in the cluster, resources begin to load on the two servers that are up and running in the cluster.

The timeout is an attribute of the cluster. It gets initialized when the NCS modules are being loaded. If you change the value, restart Cluster Services (rcnovell-ncs restart) to get the updated settings.