Monitoring the Exchange Cluster Service

An Exchange cluster service is a collection of physical Exchange mail servers that can act as a single logical server. Requests to a cluster are routed through a virtual cluster server that is assigned a cluster IP address and TCP port. Requests to this server can be handled by any of the individual nodes in the cluster at any given point in time, depending on which node is active at that time.

Since clusters are deployed in environments where 24*7 availability and responsiveness are critical, it is imperative that the performance of the clusters is monitored all the time.

To monitor an Exchange cluster, an eG external agent is deployed, which emulates a mail send-receive activity on the Exchange cluster. The emulated requests are directed at the virtual cluster server. Therefore, you need to manage the virtual cluster server as an Exchange Cluster service using the eG administrative interface.

Note:

For more details on how eG Enterprise monitors clusters, refer to Administering eG Enterprise.

The layer model used by the eG Enterprise to monitor the Exchange cluster service is given below (see Figure 1)

Figure 1 : Layer model of the Exchange Cluster service

The following section will deal with the first layer of Figure 1 only.