Well, the wording seems pretty ambiguous to me:

X - "If restart is unsuccessful, fail over ... "

X - "If all the restart attempts fail, begin restarting again ... "

That sounds mutually exclusive. But regardless, I'm assuming the last choice probably trumps the first one.

The reason I'm delving into this, is to try to troubleshoot a cluster incident that happened back in September, before I was hired. I'm looking at the Cluster config parameters to try to determine the possible causes. Apparently a cluster resource failed, but the cluster never failed over. My suspicion is the restart policies that are set:

"If Resource Fails, attempt restart on current node" is selected, with values:

Period for restarts: 15:00 mins

Maximum restarts: 1

"If restart is unsuccessful, fail over all resources in this service or application", is selected

"If all the restart attempts fail, begin restarting again after the specified period (hh:mm)", is selected with a value of 6 hours (!?!)

I suspect this last parameter is what shot them in the foot.

BTW, thanks for the quick and informative replies.