Patent ID: 8055933

Claim:
A method, in a data processing system, for performing a failover operation of an application from a faulty node of a high availability cluster to a selected target node, comprising: receiving a notification of an imminent failure of the faulty node; receiving health information from one or more additional nodes of a local failover scope of a failover policy associated with the faulty node, wherein the faulty node and the one or more additional nodes are members of the local failover scope; dynamically modifying the failover policy based on the health information from the one or more additional nodes of the local failover scope; selecting a node from the modified failover policy as the target node for failover of an application running on the faulty node to the target node; and performing failover of the application to the target node based on the selection of the node from the modified failover policy, wherein the health information from the one or more additional nodes of the local failover scope comprises, for each additional node in the one or more additional nodes, information identifying an amount of time the additional node can remain operational based on a backup power supply.