Optional Configuration

Applies To: Operations Manager 2007, Operations Manager 2007 R2, Windows Server 2008

The Windows Server 2008 Network Load Balancing (NLB) Management Pack includes the capability to monitor the NLB cluster in an application-aware way. Application-aware monitoring provides the following benefits:

  1. The health state of the load-balanced application can directly affect the health state of the cluster node and the health state of the cluster itself.

  2. The health state change of the load-balanced application can trigger a system response that manipulates the cluster nodes in the following ways:

    • If the load-balanced application is in an unhealthy state, the current NLB node is taken out of the cluster

    • If the load-balanced application returns to a healthy state, the current NLB node is added back into the cluster

To provide the application-aware monitoring capabilities, you must import an additional management pack that links the NLB Management Pack with the load-balanced application management pack.

The NLB Management Pack includes a management pack that provides application-aware monitoring capabilities for Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0. The name of the management pack file is: Microsoft.Windows.NetworkLoadBalancing.2008.IISIntegration.mp. Note that this will also work for IIS 7.5 versions using the IIS 7.0 Management Pack.

If you want the NLB Management Pack to take action based on health state changes reported by the IIS 7.0 Management Pack, you must take the additional step of enabling the following two recoveries that are disabled by default:

Recovery Name Target Associated Monitor

Start NLB Node

NLB Server Role

NLB Node depends on load-balanced application

Stop NLB Node

NLB Server Role

NLB Node depends on load-balanced application