A systems administrator manages a critical database application hosted on a two-node, active-passive cluster. During routine monitoring, the primary server suffers a catastrophic hardware failure and goes offline. The clustering software detects the outage and automatically transfers the database service and its associated resources to the standby server, which then becomes the active node. Client connections are re-established to the new active node with minimal interruption. Which high-availability process has occurred?
The correct answer is Failover. Failover is the automatic process of switching operations to a redundant or standby server upon the failure of the primary system. In the described active-passive cluster, when the active node failed, the passive node was automatically brought online to take over the workload, which is the definition of a failover event.
Failback is the process of restoring operations to the original primary server after it has been repaired and brought back online; this is the reverse of a failover.
Load balancing is a technique used to distribute traffic across multiple active servers to optimize performance and prevent any single server from being overwhelmed. The scenario describes an active-passive setup, not an active-active one where load balancing would be used.
Round robin is a specific algorithm used for load balancing, where requests are distributed sequentially among a group of servers. It is a method of distribution, not the process of switching due to a failure.
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