SharePoint farm: 2 WFE + 4 App + 2 FAST Search + DB
The WFEs are load balanced.
The Application servers are using SharePoint's built-in basic round-robin load balancer.
We're patching our servers (critical OS patches only) and the WFEs are fine - we can remove one at a time to update. We're trying to work out how we can temporarily stop SharePoint using the application server we're patching at the time.
Do we stop IIS (but will SharePoint automatically restart it using one of its system services?)? Or do we need to stop a service through SharePoint so that it can see that a server should not be used, but not deleted from the farm.
Thank you