Linux-HA heartbeat Heartbeat is a daemon that provides cluster infrastructure (communication and membership) services to its clients. This allows clients to know about the presence (or disappearance!) of peer processes on other machines and to easily exchange messages with them. Heartbeat still comes with an integrated primitive resource manager, which basically is just a shell script. This is also referred to as "v1 style" or "haresources style" configuration. You might also want to install cluster-glue, heartbeat, resource-agents, fence-agents.