How Domino® finds a replica during failover
When a user tries to open a database that is not available, the Cluster Manager looks in the Cluster Database Directory for a replica of that database. To find the replica, the Cluster Manager looks for a database that has the same replica ID as the original database. It also makes sure that the replica is not marked Out of service or Pending delete from the cluster.
If there is more than one replica of a database on a server, the Cluster Manager assumes that selective replication is used to replicate these databases. To be sure it fails over to the correct replica, the Cluster Manager selects a replica that has the same path as the original database. Therefore, if you put multiple replicas on a server, be sure that all replicas in the cluster that use the same selective replication formulas have the same path. Otherwise, users may fail over to a different replica.
When failover occurs on a server, a failover or workload balance event is created in the log file.