In a server consolidation effort, we have begun to use host headers in IIS to
bind the friendly name of the site across the servers that make up the web
farm. This puts the IP address of the server and the web address at the
same level in terms of resolution. The practical implication is that we can
monitor http://slickweb.mydomain.com but can no longer go to
http://server1.mydomain.com/slickweb or go to Http://192.168.4.42/slickweb to
get to the web and verify that each server in the farm is actually serving
pages correctly. We only know that whatever server we happened to hit is
serving the page in a given way, good or bad, but we do not know about the
experience across the entire farm. Our content switches do not cover this
checking, as they verify that the server is responding on the port, but not
if that server is serving pages. The work around for individual
administrators to access specific servers and webs has been to use their
local host file to resolve http://slickweb.mydomain.com to a specific web
farm server’s IP. This is a cumbersome process that can allow
troubleshooting when needed, but is slow for them and impractical when trying
to consistently monitoring large numbers of web servers across multiple
farms. We are looking for thoughts on monitoring web farms that use host
headers without resorting to creating farms of monitoring stations that
statically define each web friendly name to an underlying web farm server IP.
Post by k6497Sure, let me put together a doc to better explain the situation.
Post by Boris Yanushpolsky [MSFT]I am not sure I fully understand what is the problem, can you please ping me
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Boris Yanushpolsky
Program Manager
Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Post by k6497We are looking for suggestions or better yet known successful methods of
monitoring individual servers in a web farm that leverage host headers.
Previously we would use and monitor a friendly name for a site but we could
still also connect directly to each web server to verify they were all
serving pages. Now, we are not able to go to each machine by name. Are
there suggestions for successfully verifying each machine in this
configuration?