Product Benefits - Novell SUSE LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 SP2 HEARTBEAT Manual

• A single point of administration through either a graphical Heartbeat tool or a
command line tool. Both tools let you configure and monitor your Heartbeat cluster.
• The ability to tailor a cluster to the specific applications and hardware infrastructure
that fit your organization.
• Dynamic assignment and reassignment of server storage on an as-needed basis.
• Time-dependent configuration enables resources to fail back to repaired nodes at
specified times.
• Support for shared disk systems. Although shared disk systems are supported, they
are not required.
• Support for cluster file systems like OCFS 2.
• Support for cluster-aware logical volume managers like EVMS.

1.2 Product Benefits

Heartbeat allows you to configure up to 16 Linux servers into a high-availability cluster,
where resources can be dynamically switched or moved to any server in the cluster.
Resources can be configured to automatically switch or be moved in the event of a re-
source server failure, or they can be moved manually to troubleshoot hardware or balance
the workload.
Heartbeat provides high availability from commodity components. Lower costs are
obtained through the consolidation of applications and operations onto a cluster.
Heartbeat also allows you to centrally manage the complete cluster and to adjust re-
sources to meet changing workload requirements (thus, manually "load balance" the
cluster).
An equally important benefit is the potential reduction of unplanned service outages as
well as planned outages for software and hardware maintenance and upgrades.
Reasons that you would want to implement a Heartbeat cluster include:
• Increased availability
• Improved performance
2 Heartbeat