Quickstart

Quickstart Editions

We have a quickstart edition for each major distro. To continue, select the distribution you'll be using:

Why Does Each Distribution Have its Own Quickstart?

Now that all distributions have standardized on Corosync 2 or greater as the underlying cluster layer, the differences are minimal.

However, in the past, Pacemaker also supported Corosync 1 (with or without CMAN) as well as Heartbeat. Different distributions supported different cluster layers, requiring different set-up. We call each combination of Pacemaker and cluster layer a "stack".

For example, on RHEL6 the supported stack is based on CMAN which has APIs Pacemaker can use to obtain the membership and quroum information it needs. Although CMAN uses Corosync underneath, it is configured via cluster.conf and Pacemaker is started as a separate init script.

However SLES11 doesn't ship CMAN, so its users configure corosync.conf directly and enable a custom plugin that gets loaded into Corosync (because Corosync 1.4 doesn't have the quorum and membership APIs needed by Pacemaker). This plugin also starts Pacemaker automatically when Corosync is started.

To confuse things further, SLES users start Corosync with the openAIS init script because it used to be part of that project.

See this post for a longer discussion on the different stack options and how they relate to cluster filesystems in particular.