A CTR is a coordinated group of network daemons that automatically handles granting, revoking, and timing out tickets (instead of the administrator revoking the ticket somewhere, waiting for everything to stop, and then granting it on the desired site).

Pacemaker does not implement its own CTR, but interoperates with external software designed for that purpose (similar to how resource and fencing agents are not directly part of pacemaker).

Participating clusters run the CTR daemons, which connect to each other, exchange information about their connectivity, and vote on which sites gets which tickets.

A ticket is granted to a site only once the CTR is sure that the ticket has been relinquished by the previous owner, implemented via a timer in most scenarios. If a site loses connection to its peers, its tickets time out and recovery occurs. After the connection timeout plus the recovery timeout has passed, the other sites are allowed to re-acquire the ticket and start the resources again.

This can also be thought of as a "quorum server", except that it is not a single quorum ticket, but several.