"The definitive open-source high-availability stack for the Linux platform builds upon the Pacemaker cluster resource manager." -- LINUX Journal, "Ahead of the Pack: the Pacemaker High-Availability Stack"

Features

  • Detection and recovery of machine and application-level failures
  • Supports practically any redundancy configuration
  • Supports both quorate and resource-driven clusters
  • Configurable strategies for dealing with quorum loss (when multiple nodes fail)
  • Supports application startup/shutdown ordering, without requiring the applications to run on the same node
  • Supports applications that must or must not run on the same node
  • Supports applications which need to be active on multiple nodes
  • Supports applications with dual roles (promoted and unpromoted)
  • Provably correct response to any failure or cluster state. The cluster's response to any stimuli can be tested offline before the condition exists

Background

Black Duck Open Hub project report for pacemaker

Pacemaker has been around since 2004 and is a collaborative effort by the ClusterLabs community, including full-time developers with Red Hat and SuSE.

Pacemaker ships with most modern Linux distributions and has been deployed in many critical environments including Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH (DFS) which uses Pacemaker to ensure its air traffic control systems are always available.

Andrew Beekhof was Pacemaker's original author and long-time project lead. The current project lead is Ken Gaillot.