About deciding the order of existing coordination points

Last published : Sep 11, 2026
You can decide the order in which coordination points can participate in a race during a network partition. In a network partition scenario, I/O fencing attempts to contact coordination points for membership arbitration based on the order that is set in the vxfentab file.
When I/O fencing is not able to connect to the first coordination point in the sequence it goes to the second coordination point and so on. To avoid a cluster panic, the surviving subcluster must win majority of the coordination points. So, the order must begin with the coordination point that has the best chance to win the race and must end with the coordination point that has the least chance to win the race.
For fencing configurations that use a mix of coordination point servers and coordination disks, you can specify either coordination point servers before coordination disks or disks before servers.
Note: Disk-based fencing does not support setting the order of existing coordination points.
Considerations to decide the order of coordination points
  • Choose the coordination points based on their chances to gain membership on the cluster during the race and hence gain control over a network partition. In effect, you have the ability to save a partition.
  • First in the order must be the coordination point that has the best chance to win the race. The next coordination point you list in the order must have relatively lesser chance to win the race. Complete the order such that the last coordination point has the least chance to win the race.