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High Availability without Pacemaker
Workaround
The Pacemaker cluster resource manager is not the friendliest of applications. In the best case scenario, Pacemaker will keep the load balanced on your cluster and monitor the back-end servers, rerouting work to maintain high availability when a system goes down. Pacemaker has come a long way since the release of its predecessor, Heartbeat 2 – an unfriendly and unstable tool that was only manageable at all by integrating XML snippets.
Pacemaker no longer has the shortcomings of Heartbeat, but it still has not outgrown some of the original usability issues. The Pacemaker resource manager has ambitious goals, but what looks promising in the lab often fails in reality, because it is too difficult to use (Figure 1). Additionally, it is not as if development of Pacemaker has progressed particularly well: Although the project can look back on several years of existence, bugs have repeatedly reared their heads, thereby undermining confidence in the Pacemaker stack.
Figure 1: Object of hate: The Pacemaker cluster manager provokes spontaneous nightmares for many admins. Granted, the software is not very intuitive.
Admins often face a difficult choice: Introducing Pacemaker might solve the HA problem, but it means installing a "black box" in
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