Fault Tolerant long-lived TCP connections

I definitely echo what hoolio said.

 

 

That done, it sounds like you're trying to do some variation of "message-based load balancing", which might be a good phrase to look for in the F5 documentation. I don't have a good grip on how to configure it, or the level of support for it in released versions, but that might give you a good starting point.

 

 

Now, to expound a bit on the problem, is "Tibco RVD" a request/response protocol, or is it something else? If it is request/response, then suppose that a client sends a request, the server goes down, the BIG-IP acts as you intend and the client is transparently connected to a different server. Now the new server is waiting for a request that the client has already sent. Will the protocol handle this? If not, it may still be possible for the BIG-IP to solve this problem, but it will likely be a very intensive iRules-based solution if any can be found. I'm just trying to consider all the aspects of the problem, so we can try to come to a solution.