Overview; Product Features - Novell SUSE LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 SP2 HEARTBEAT Manual

Overview

Heartbeat is an open source server clustering system that ensures high availability and
manageability of critical network resources including data, applications, and services.
It is a multinode clustering product for Linux that supports failover, failback, and mi-
gration (load balancing) of individually managed cluster resources. Heartbeat is shipped
with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and provides you with the means to make virtual
machines (containing services) highly available.
This chapter introduces the main product features and benefits of Heartbeat. Find sev-
eral exemplary scenarios for configuring clusters and learn about the components
making up a Heartbeat version 2 cluster. The last section provides an overview of the
Heartbeat architecture, describing the individual architecture layers and processes
within the cluster.

1.1 Product Features

Heartbeat includes several important features to help you ensure and manage the
availability of your network resources. These include:
• Support for Fibre Channel or iSCSI storage area networks
• Multi-node active cluster, containing up to 16 Linux servers. Any server in the
cluster can restart resources (applications, services, IP addresses, and file systems)
from a failed server in the cluster.
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