By A high availability (HA) cluster can pass a health check and still be one misconfiguration away from an unexpected failover event. Disk size mismatches between clustered nodes, unresolved configuration drift, and deferred remediation are among the most common causes of HA failures that teams believed were protected. In environments where continuous uptime is non-negotiable, the window between identifying a finding and acting on it is where risk lives.
In this interview on TFiR, Trey Isaac, Sr. Product Support Engineer at SIOS Technology, walks through the industries where HA health checks are most critical and explains exactly what teams must do after receiving a health check report to prevent failure before it happens.
Guest: Trey Isaac, Sr. Product Support Engineer at SIOS Technology
Show: TFiR
Here is what every HA engineer and infrastructure operations team needs to know.
Technical Deep Dive
Q: Which industries cannot afford to skip HA health checks?
Trey Isaac, Sr. Product Support Engineer at SIOS Technology, points to airports as a primary example. Airport systems must remain continuously available so passengers can book tickets and flight operations can proceed without interruption. Any downtime in that environment carries direct operational and safety consequences, making HA health checks a non-negotiable requirement rather than a best practice.
“You won’t want an airport to be anything but up all the time so people can book their tickets and the airplane can actually get off the ground.” — Trey Isaac, Sr. Product Support Engineer, SIOS Technology
Q: What should teams do immediately after receiving an HA health check report?
Isaac is direct: every recommendation in the health check report must be implemented immediately, before an unexpected HA event occurs. SIOS delivers a formal health check report to customers after each assessment, and the intent is for teams to act on every finding without delay. Deferring corrections leaves the cluster in a known-degraded state and removes the protection the health check was designed to confirm.
“Immediately implement all the recommendations we give you is going to be critical to your success.” — Trey Isaac, Sr. Product Support Engineer, SIOS Technology
Q: What is an example of a specific HA misconfiguration that must be corrected right away?
Isaac uses disk size mismatch as a concrete example. If one disk on the primary node is larger than the corresponding disk on the secondary node, that discrepancy needs to be corrected before a failover event exposes it. Configuration asymmetry between cluster nodes is a documented source of failure during actual HA events, and it is exactly the kind of finding a health check is designed to surface while there is still time to act.
“If one disk on the first system is bigger than the disk on the second system, we hope you immediately make that correction before an unexpected HA event happens.” — Trey Isaac, Sr. Product Support Engineer, SIOS Technology
Resources & Documentation
- SIOS Technology, vendor resources and documentation for SIOS high availability and disaster recovery solutions
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👇 Click to Read Full Raw Transcript
Swapnil Bhartiya: Are there any specific industries or use cases where you have seen ha health check makes the most immediate impact with these industries. They cannot make a compromise. They must have health checks there.
Trey Isaac: One industry that comes to mind is an airport, right? So, you know, these, these planes have to get off the ground. People got places to go, some people leisure, some people have important places to be, right? So, you know, you won’t want an airport to be able to be up all the time. So, you know, people can book their tickets and the airplane can actually get off the ground. So airport is definitely is one industry I can think of that comes to mind.
Swapnil Bhartiya: And what should teams do after they have completed a health check? What do they prioritize finding and turn them into action? Because just going to a doctor and getting your, hey, this is a report is fine, but if your cholesterol is high, you have to do something about that as well,
Trey Isaac: which you should do after you get your health check report. That’s what you know. At SIOS, we give our customers after a health check a health check report. We hope that you immediately make each correction on the health check report. Right. If one disc on the first system is bigger than the disk on the second system, we’ll hope you immediately make that correction before unexpected ha event happens. Right? So immediately implement all the recommendations we give you is going to be critical to your success.
