Forum Discussion

pcourtois's avatar
pcourtois
Icon for Altocumulus rankAltocumulus
Aug 28, 2024

F5 AWAF with HTTP/2, MRF and Websocket profiles

Good day all,   I have F5 Big-IP AWAF's (version 16.1.4.3) and I am trying to configure HTTP/2 with MRF.  My colleague and I discovered that Websocket profiles on the Virtual Server don't play well...
application delivery
http2
mrf
websocket
zamroni777's avatar
zamroni777
Icon for Nacreous rankNacreous
Aug 29, 2024

i suggest avoid mrf for now and simply use regular ltm based http and websocket profiles.
based on some mrf docs, it seems it was created for sip voip traffic.

i had mrf trial for diameter billing traffic last year but mrf couldn't do several basic things that regular ltm profile can e.g.:
ratio load balancing doesnt work, pool member's health status is ignored by mrf, mrf vserver status remains unknown, etc.

  • pcourtois's avatar
    pcourtois
    Icon for Altocumulus rankAltocumulus
    Aug 31, 2024

    Thank you for the response.  This helps a ton.  Strange however, that F5 documentation states HTTP/2 requires MRF.  Confusing.  Thanks again.  

    • zamroni777's avatar
      zamroni777
      Icon for Nacreous rankNacreous
      Sep 04, 2024

      https://techdocs.f5.com/en-us/bigip-15-1-0/big-ip-http2-full-proxy-configuration/http2-full-proxy-configuring.html#concept-2621

      considering that server side http/2 makes oneconnect unusable,
      i'd rather have http/1.1 on server side.

      in live traffic, the simultaneous loading features of http/2 is usually useful to load mutiple static contents (js, css and images).
      meanwhile dynamic contents (login transaction, load user profile, etc.) mostly still happens sequentially.

      hence, if caching static contents is enabled in ltm vserver,
      then f5 barely needs to send simultaneous requests from a client session.

      there are multiple dynamic content load from multiple client sessions in which oneconnect does tcp multiplexing
      f5 and servers also connect via datacenter wired lan, so transport latency is under 1ms.