Gateway Cluster only works one

[PowerOliveira]

Good day,

I have a cluster with two gateways, in the image above the first one does not need a VPN with the MG ending and the second one needs a VPN.
It was temporarily necessary to turn off the VPN and the dashboards failed to update.
In the absence of a gateway, I had to deactivate the second one for the dashboards to work, both access the same sources. I have this second gateway with MG ending just when the other main one fails.
My question is, does the cluster only work if both are available?
What is the main role, is there any way to change this role? The image says "Principal")
To currently work I had to deactivate the Main, but I would like it to work when one of the two fails the other is activated, is it possible?

[lbendlin]

The gateway cluster will work if at least one member is available. Of course for Business Continuity you want to have at least two.

The "principal"  or "anchor"  designation of a cluster member is garbage. It has no technical meaning. If you want to change the role you can use the "take over/restore"  option on another cluster member to kick the anchor off its throne.

Make sure "Distribute load across cluster members"  is enabled.

[PowerOliveira]

Thank you very much for the answer and the clarifications, so what is happening is that when the "main" or "anchor" is without the VPN the entire update gives an error, but if I disable it it ends up working. And I enabled the "Distribute load across cluster members" option.

[lbendlin · Accepted solution]

Yes, that is one of the worst case scenarios, when a cluster member thinks it is ready to serve requests but it isn't.  The load balancer will give it jobs which will then fail. In that case it is better to disable the cluster member and visit it with a clue-by-four.

The other worst case scenario is when the proxy is down. No proxy = no gateway.

[PowerOliveira]

I understand, so there is no solution, the way is to disable and enable it manually when you need to use it