Patent attributes
A central controlling service for datacenter activation/deactivation control in a cluster deployment to assist in preventing a split-brain scenario. The central controlling service provides a central point of control in the datacenter for application servers to periodically query as to whether to go offline, online, or normal. Redundancy of the central service facilitates detection of datacenter failure by the redundant services interacting to resolve the state of control information. This control information is then used to answer the server queries. On startup from a datacenter failure, a single instance of the central service queries other redundant instance(s) to determine if the single instance is starting up from a datacenter-wide failure or from operations other than total datacenter failure. If the failure is datacenter-wide, a central service protocol assists in resolving to the single service keeping the associated datacenter servers offline; otherwise, the server queries are answered to go online.