A system, method and computer program product for use in a server cluster having plural server nodes implementing a server tier in a client-server computing architecture in order to determine which of two or more partitioned server subgroups has a quorum. A determination is made of relative priorities of the subgroups and a quorum is awarded to the subgroup having a highest relative priority. The relative priorities are determined by policy rules that evaluate comparative server node application state information. The server node application state information may include one or more of client connectivity, application priority, resource connectivity, processing capability, memory availability, and input/output resource availability, etc. The policy rules evaluate the application state information for each subgroup and can assign different weights to different types of application state information. An interface may be provided for receiving policy rules specified by a cluster application.