Port aware NLB

Hi there,

I currently use an appliance for load balancing webservers. Due to costs, I
would like to move to Windows NLB. The one issue I am having in my labs is
that NLB only knows to take a server out of the cluster if the server it self
is down whereas our appliance will take a server out of the cluster if it
detects (for example) that port 80 TCP is unreachable or not responding (or
in some cases, if it doesn't return the right content to a GET command).
This poses a problem when doing server maintenance as the actual server is
still up but the W3CSVC is not.

Is there anyway to configure NLB to detect certain parameters? If not, does
anyone know if this is a feature of Windows Longhorn Server?

A response is most appreciated.

Thanks,
--
-Steven

I don't have an answer for you, but you might consider posting your question
to a cluster group, such as microsoft.public.windows.server.clustering

rgds,
Edwin.


"Steven Berkovitz" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:5EEB0316-B7E2-4391-946B-(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hi there,
>
> I currently use an appliance for load balancing webservers. Due to costs,
I
> would like to move to Windows NLB. The one issue I am having in my labs
is
> that NLB only knows to take a server out of the cluster if the server it
self
> is down whereas our appliance will take a server out of the cluster if it
> detects (for example) that port 80 TCP is unreachable or not responding
(or
> in some cases, if it doesn't return the right content to a GET command).
> This poses a problem when doing server maintenance as the actual server is
> still up but the W3CSVC is not.
>
> Is there anyway to configure NLB to detect certain parameters? If not,
does
> anyone know if this is a feature of Windows Longhorn Server?
>
> A response is most appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> --
> -Steven