In the last of our three part series on MySQL high availability we discuss the Linux Heartbeat project, and how it can be used to automate failover between two MySQL databases.
Heartbeat exposes a virtual IP address for use by the database, and manages it as well. In the event that one server becomes unavailable, Heartbeat will revoke primary control of DRBD from that node, hand over the IP address to the alternate node, mount the DRBD device, and start MySQL. MySQL’s InnoDB engine will then perform crash recovery, rollback uncommitted transactions, and startup.
Read the full article at Database Journal – DRBD & MySQL, Heartbeat Setup