In most circumstances, it is highly desirable to prevent healthy resources from being moved around the cluster. Moving resources almost always requires a period of downtime. For complex services like Oracle databases, this period can be quite long.

To address this, Pacemaker has the concept of resource stickiness which controls how much a service prefers to stay running where it is. You may like to think of it as the "cost" of any downtime. By default, Pacemaker assumes there is zero cost associated with moving resources and will do so to achieve "optimal" ^[17] resource placement. We can specify a different stickiness for every resource, but it is often sufficient to change the default.