Forum Discussion
Bob_10976
Nimbostratus
NimbostratusBleeding Off Users...
Hello All,
First off let me start off by explaining that i'm very new to the BigIP family so my questions may be a bit on the newb side, sorry in advance.
I'd like to know how to bleed off users/connections, or at least prevent new connections to a specific server listed in a pool so that when I take the server out of the pool for maintenance that I don't simply kill that session.
I'd also like to know how I can take out a specfic server from all pools at once. For example, I want to do maintence to my web3 server so I want to disable it from the BigIP pools but I don't want to touch every single pool to do that. We are setup where we have 3 web servers, each site on each web server has a unquie IP, so in the BIG IP pools the member is listed as a IP address, not as webserver3 for example.
Also let me say I've inherited this setup, I've only been here a few weeks. The Big IP version we have is 4.5.12 Build19-a. We have already purchased newer BigIPs but havent' gotten around installing them.
Thanks in advance.
Bob
- Hi Bob -
Welcome!
The 4.5 manual explains it fairly well (Click here) but it doesn't seem to mention the GUI option for Enabled/Disabled is "Enable Sessions" checkbox, which I think is what you're looking for...
In summary:
To bleed off connections, you'll need a persistence profile applied to the pool, then you'd uncheck "Enable Sessions" to bleed off connections (only persistent or active connections will be accepted) or uncheck "Enable Connections" to disallow any new connections (existing connections will be allowed to finish).
To remove a server from service in all pools by IP address, go to the Node Address and uncheck "Enable Sessions" to bleed off connections or uncheck "Enable Connections" to disallow all new connections.
HTH
/deb 
Bob_10976Deb, Thanks for the reply. I have a couple of follow up questions.
The persistence profile you mentioned, I don't believe we have that setup on any pool, unless its a default setting. I went into one of my pools and looked but didn't see anything to do with persistence. I can go to the Pools tab and I have a Persistence Connections tab and I can do a "*" and see the connections but I don't see where I assign a profile to a pool. I can see the check box for Enable Sessions and Enable Connections in each one of my nodes though.
Second question is about removing a server from the server farm. Since I have some 30 pools set up, each with about 3 server nodes assigned and each of those nodes have a differnent IP address. What I'd have to do now is go into each node and uncheck the Enable Sessions/Connections button to allow me to do maintanence. What'd I'd like to do is some how assoicate each IP to a server name, for example 10.10.10.1, 10.11.10.1, 10.12.10.1, etc are all assoicated to say WEB3 and I'd like to simply say uncheck the Enable Connections option for WEB3 and it automatically disables all nodes assoicated to it. Saving me a ton of time.
Thanks,
Bob- Oops, sorry, "profile" is v9 lingo.
For 4.x, you just need to apply persistence in the pool, otherwise the concept of "sessions" doesn't exist. Here's the manual page for persistence: [url[https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_4_x/manuals/product/bigip4_5ref/BIGip_pools.html1183732[/ur]
To apply persistence in the GUI, you'd select the pool & click on the "Persistence" tab (not the "Persistent Connections" tab that shows the stats), then select one of the options, fill in the required info (timeout etc) & apply.
As for the 2nd question, there really is no way to do that. BIG-IP has no way to associate groups of nodes like that.
/deb