A technician runs report and notices utilization on one of the application servers in a round-robin pool is much lower than the others. Which of the following services should be checked FIRST to…

File services handle file sharing protocols such as SMB or NFS and have no bearing on how a round-robin load balancer distributes web application traffic across nodes.

DHCP assigns IP addresses to network clients and plays no role in determining how application-level round-robin load balancing routes requests among clustered servers.

ARP resolves IP addresses to MAC addresses at the data link layer and does not influence how the cluster service distributes application traffic at the session or application layer.

Cluster services govern how incoming requests are routed and balanced among nodes in the pool, and a misconfigured or malfunctioning cluster service may be excluding or under-routing traffic to the affected server. Verifying cluster services ensures the node is properly registered, marked healthy, and participating fully in load distribution before investigating lower-level components.