How to Configure Exchange Server Clusters to be Monitored

適用於: Exchange Server, Operations Manager 2007

The Microsoft Windows Server Library Management Pack discovers the virtual node of a cluster, and the virtual node is added to the Management Group. The Exchange Server 2003 Management Pack then discovers and monitors the virtual node of the clustered servers running Exchange Server 2003. This means the virtual node of the cluster is associated with the Exchange 2003 Role, not the physical nodes.

Installing the Operations Manager 2007 Agent

To monitor Exchange Server in a clustered environment, install the Operations Manager 2007 agent on all physical nodes of the cluster. Also, ensure that you turn on Agent Proxy for each physical node in the cluster. For more information, see the "How to Enable the Exchange Topology View" section in this guide.

Monitoring the Virtual Cluster

After the agent is installed on all physical nodes of the cluster, these servers will appear in the Operations Console. The virtual cluster servers will display in the Microsoft Exchange Server\Exchange 2003 node in the Monitoring pane of the Operations Manager 2007 Operations Console within several minutes.

To fully monitor server clusters, it is recommended that you install the Windows Cluster Management Pack.

Health State and Exchange Clusters

If there are multiple virtual servers running Exchange hosted on the same node of a cluster, the state of the virtual server displayed in the console might not always accurately reflect the actual state for the virtual servers. For example, if you disable one of the virtual server's resources, such as SMTP, the state does not change. This is because the SMTP service is still running and servicing the other virtual server's SMTP resources.

IIS and Exchange 2003 on clusters

In a clustered configuration, you may see errors from the IIS Management Pack that IIS-related services (NNTP, FTP, SMTP, W3SVC) are not running if the virtual node fails over to another server in the cluster and the old node becomes passive.

A workaround for this scenario is to disable monitoring of IIS-related services on the physical nodes of the cluster by the IIS Management Pack and let the Exchange Configuration wizard handle monitoring of the IIS-related services. You can accomplish this by creating an Operations Manager group containing the relevant targets (for example the instances of the class IIS 2003 Web Servers corresponding to the physical nodes of the cluster) and disabling those monitors for the group.

Then, run the Exchange Configuration Wizard to let it handle the monitoring of the IIS services (SMTP and W3SVC services are monitored by default by the Exchange Server 2003 Management Pack).

Monitoring the MTA Service on Exchange 2003 clusters

If you have clustered the MTA Service, it is recommended that you monitor that service via the MTA Service Monitor which in included in the Exchange Server 2003 Management Pack.

In order for the monitor to work correctly on the cluster, override the MTA Service Monitor (“Microsoft Exchange MTA Stacks Service Monitor”) for the cluster virtual server to set “Alert only if service startup type is automatic” to false. Also ensure that you are not monitoring the MTA service via the Exchange Configuration Wizard.