Does a Node have to be part of a pool?

I went ahead and created a pool and added the node to the pool. I also created a health monitor for port 443 and associated the health monitor to the pool. When I do a packet capture from my workstation to the web server, I see a lot of TCP retransmissions, until the page times out. On the web server running tomcat, I don't see in the log file any connection, nor when I do a netstat of my workstation.

Just want to point out that we have other web servers setup in the same network in different pools/VIPs without this problem.

I'm stumped as to what the problem might be or what I'm doing wrong. Thanks, Judy