Systems and methods are described for a non-disruptive planned failover from a primary copy of data at a primary storage cluster to a mirror copy of the data at a cross-site secondary storage cluster without using an external mediator. According to an example, a planned failover feature of a multi-site distributed storage system provides an order of operations such that a primary copy of a first data center continues to serve I/O operations until a mirror copy of a second data center is ready. This planned failover feature improves functionality and efficiency of the distributed storage system by providing non-disruptiveness during planned failover without using an external mediator based on a primary storage cluster being selected as an authority to implement a state machine with a persistent configuration database to track a planned failover state for the planned failover.