Patent ID: 7409576

Claim:
A high-availability cluster apparatus, the apparatus comprising: a plurality of computing nodes of said cluster; a cluster master communicatively connected to each of the nodes; non-volatile memory associated with the cluster master, wherein the non-volatile memory is configured to store data keeping track of quality measures of the nodes; and computer-executable code of the cluster master configured to periodically execute a preventative maintenance task to test a least-recently tested active node so as to proactively maintain the cluster, wherein the preventative maintenance task is configured to swap out a least-recently-tested active node from the HA cluster and swap in a best-available spare node into the HA cluster, run functional tests on the least-recently-tested active node after that node is swapped out of the HA cluster such that the least-recently-tested node becomes a just-tested node, and restore a freshness measure of the just-tested node to a most fresh value and to change the status variable of the just-tested node to a spare status.