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. In order to be useful to users, the Heartbeat daemon needs to be combined with a cluster resource manager (CRM) which has the task of starting and stopping the services (IP addresses, web servers, etc.) that cluster will make highly available. Pacemaker is the preferred cluster resource manager for clusters based on Heartbeat.
http://www.linux-ha.org/wiki/Heartbeat