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Priya_73968's avatar
Priya_73968
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Feb 05, 2009

Detect the health of webserver and route traffic accordingly

Hi

 

I am a system admin working on websphere and have no clue on the capabilities of F5.

 

Can anyone tell me if F5 can check the status of a webserver(down/up) and if the webserver is down, can it automatically route traffic to working webserver.

 

 

And continuosly ping both the severs every 60 seconds and once the server that is down is up again, can it load balance like before?

 

 

Basically I would want F5 to monitor two URL's like https://sseweb1.mydomain.com and route traffic to the working URL, in case the other webserver is down.

 

 

 

Thanks

 

P
management
monitoring
  • Priya_73968's avatar
    Priya_73968
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Feb 06, 2009
    Hey

     

     

    Thanks, the redirect should be automatic, once it detected the failure member, can I have some documentation on that so I can guide my team up here to implement after reading a little bit, or if you can present quick steps to acheive it, that is wonderful :-)

     

     

    Basically what I am trying to achieve is direct traffic to the server that is functional automatically and when both the servers are down , F5 should throw a maintainance page( That I have it ready).

     

     

    Thanks

     

    Priya
  • L4L7_53191's avatar
    L4L7_53191
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    Feb 06, 2009
    Priya: Here's a setup that we used with some WebSphere (and other J2EE) apps that worked quite well. In our case we had several resources that we cared about: an instance of MQ that the app connected to and a couple of remote databases. If any of these were down or if our container wasn't able to connect for some reason, we'd want to take the server out of the pool.

     

     

    Our approach was to write a basic servlet that would check database connectivity, fetch a simple message from the queue, etc. Then it would report back: UP or DOWN.

     

     

    On the BigIP we simply created a monitor that pointed to our servlet (be sure and pass the HOST header to WebSphere, and I always add a Connection: close header as well), and added a "fallback host" to our http profile that we applied to the virtual server.

     

     

    The fallback host setting basically means this: when all nodes are down, redirect to some other site. In the field, place the location you want them to get the 302 for.

     

     

    Hope this helps, and good luck!

     

     

    -Matt