Load balancers can run multiple health checks when operating at Layer 7. However, these tests are not necessarily a reliable way of determining whether an Exchange workload is operating correctly. To address this gap, Microsoft introduced two features in Exchange 2013, which are still present in 2016: Managed Availability and a health check web page. Load balancers can take advantage of these health web pages to assess whether or not a particular workload is healthy or not from the perspective of Managed Availability. Additionally, administrators can also take advantage of these to perform their own checks and validations.
In this recipe, you will look at how to use the shell and these health check web pages to check the health of several Exchange workloads.