Understanding E-mail Notifications
Applies To: Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 R2, Microsoft HPC Pack 2012, Microsoft HPC Pack 2012 R2
E-mail notifications, when enabled, can inform job owners when their jobs start and complete. This functionality applies to individual jobs, and the job owner must specify, when creating a job, if an e-mail notification should be sent when the job starts, completes, or both. The e-mail notification is sent to the e-mail account of the job owner, which is obtained based on the domain credentials of the job owner.
In the E-mail Notifications tab of the Job Scheduler Configuration dialog box, you can enable e-mail notifications, as well as specify the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server, the security and authentication settings, and the originating address that are used for sending e-mail notifications.
For information about how to change the configuration options, see Configure the HPC Job Scheduler Service.
Important considerations
The following list outlines several things to consider when enabling e-mail notifications on your cluster:
If the SMTP server that you want to use to send e-mail notifications requires authentication, you can specify domain credentials or non-domain credentials. Domain credentials can be verified, but non-domain credentials cannot be verified. For this reason, if you are using non-domain credentials to connect to the SMTP server, ensure that they are valid.
Depending on the security settings of the SMTP server, the credentials that you provide for sending e-mail notifications must be able to send e-mails using the e-mail account that you specify as the originating address.
The SMTP server that you specify might limit the number e-mails that can be sent from a single account each day. Verify with the administrator of the SMTP server that the e-mail account that you want to use does not have a limit, or that the limit that is set for that account is sufficient.
E-mail notifications can be affected by different conditions outside of your HPC cluster, like the responsiveness of the domain controller or the SMTP server, network congestion, the load of the SMTP server, among others. It is important that you evaluate these conditions before enabling e-mail notifications, or in the future if cluster users report having problems receiving e-mail notifications.
The job scheduler maintains an internal queue of pending notifications. For each entry in the queue, the job scheduler looks up the user in Active Directory, creates the e-mail, and then sends it. If the message gets an error, the notification is requeued. The scheduler can attempt to send up to 1,200 notifications per minute. The maximum queue length is 6,000 entries long. Notifications are dropped from the queue when the queue length is exceeded.
Error (EventID 101) and Warning (EventID 102) events about dropped or failed e-mail notifications are logged to the Windows HPC Server event log by the Scheduler.
If you want to use a custom notification system, you can disable the built-in notification system. The job property that is used to request notification on a per job basis is accessible through HPC PowerShell, the command line, and the HPC APIs.