Hi Ahmed,
If no one tells you otherwise, I would say keeping the VS port the same as the service port on the pool members a good initial approach. But in your place I would confirm with the application owner.
When the monitor has an alias port of *, the port used is whatever is defined in the pool member. So it's usually ok to leave the alias with its default value of *:*
Forcing the alias is useful in a couple of situations I've encountered (and probably a few more I don't remember out of the blue):
- When the pool member listens on all ports and you want to test a specific service, say http on port 80, you would need to use 80 as alias port.
- When the application owner runs a healthcheck service on a different port. Imagine a web server running on 443, and another service on 8443, which must also be running for the server to work properly. You can use a "normal" monitor with the default alias to check 443, another monitor with alias *:8443, and consider the server as "up" only when both monitors are up.
Makes sense?
/Mike