Heartbeat in failover cluster

Abstract

This disclosure is directed to heartbeat messages for a high-availability redundant distributed computing environment (e.g., a quorum data storage implementation). Heartbeat messages may be sent from a node to other members of a duster as an indication of hardware state, network connectivity, and possibly application status on the sending node. If a member of a cluster (or quorum) goes silent (e.g., misses heartbeats), other members of the duster (or quorum) may consider that member (or the node that hosts that member) to be non-functional and may initiate a recovery action. Techniques are disclosed for using low-latency non-persistent storage for some heartbeat messages (referred to herein as a 'non-persistent heartbeat messages') to replace a portion of typical persistent (e.g., disk-based) heartbeat messages to reduce overall processing for periodic heartbeat messages. Further, implementations that aggregate multiple heartbeat messages from a node into a fewer number of heartbeat messages are disclosed.