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1.2. What Is Pacemaker?

Pacemaker is a cluster resource manager, that is, a logic responsible for a life-cycle of deployed software — indirectly perhaps even whole systems or their interconnections — under its control within a set of computers (a.k.a. nodes) and driven by prescribed rules.
It achieves maximum availability for your cluster services (a.k.a. resources) by detecting and recovering from node- and resource-level failures by making use of the messaging and membership capabilities provided by your preferred cluster infrastructure (either Corosync or Heartbeat), and possibly by utilizing other parts of the overall cluster stack.

Note

For the goal of minimal downtime a term high availability was coined and together with its acronym, HA, is well-established in the sector. To differentiate this sort of clusters from high performance computing (HPC) ones, should a context require it (apparently, not the case in this document), using HA cluster is an option.
Pacemaker’s key features include: