Hi Bill,

the failover to Secondary does not occur because it's a  controlled shutdown of Primary (as you said, you are shutting it down  gracefully).

In this case it's not viewed as a 'failure' that the  Primary server is not responding. The other server was informed about  the shutdown event. Replication / heartbeat got stopped intentionally etc.

The  logic behind it is that it was the administrator's decision to bring  the server down. If he wanted the other server to be active in the  meantime, he would just perform a switchover (just the way you mentioned  it, by selecting the server and using Make Active) prior to the  shutdown.

If you want to test the failover scenario but  would rather avoid ugly things like 'ripping off the power  cable' to shutdown the machine all from sudden I'd suggest this:

-  Suddenly unplug both network cables from the machine. Secondary should  register this failure and after the set period trigger the failover.

-  To connect the Primary back in, we need it to become Passive so we  don't get both servers Active at the same time the moment we plug the  cables back in.
(Because since we didn't really stop the Primary, only disconnected it  to simulate the failure, the server remained in the Active state.)

-  Simply restarting (the usual way is fine) the Primary should be  sufficient (if I remember correctly - the server should not be  automatically made Active after startup).
- After the restart reconnect the Primary's interfaces and start FoE. It  should hook up with the Secondary and you can resume replication /  perform a switchover back to make Primary Active (Note: of course  synchronization check needs to finish before you can perform the  Switchover).

KubaM.