Help - Cookie Persistence related

We are on v9.1.1 and using cookie persistence ("insert cookie").

 

 

The pool has about 30-40 members and everything works great. The user comes in, F5 generates the cookie and session persists (Works Great).

 

 

Now, the challenge is that we have production checkout folks, who wants to target a particular member node.

 

 

I can use "pool member" and "node" methods but they send the traffic to the member node, but totally bypasses the F5 Load balancing...and hence no persistence cookie is generated.

 

 

Is there a simple way to do what I would like to accomplish?

 

 

I did create a iRule, and in the http_request, I take the IP:PORT specified in the URI, I encode the IP:PORT in the format F5 can understand (I had asked about encoding in other posts) and I explicitly insert the persistence cookie in the Request.

 

 

This works great, F5 selects the right member that we need based on the cookie inserted in the Request but the problem is setting that cookie in Response.

 

 

Since Keep-Alive is enable b/w web server proxy and F5, I see many requests on one connection, so any global variable that I create in CLIENT_ACCEPT event and use in HTTP_REQUEST gets mangled because of multiple requests over one connection.

 

 

I tried LB_reselect from within LB_SELECTED event, but iRule won't even compile, it complains that it is not valid within the Event.

 

 

I will truly appreciate if you have any feedback or suggessions to solve this.

 

 

Thanks in advance,

 

-Asif