Help me understand Load Balancing
Good afternoon everyone,
I am hoping someone can help me understand the difference between something that is "failing a healthcheck" in an F5 and something that is "Forced Offline" and how the load balancer would react to both.
At my company I notice that if I have a server failing the healthcheck in the load balancer, that load balancer will still send requests to that server experiencing issues. But if I force that server offline manually, then the load balancer respects that the server is down and doesn't send it any requests until we bring it back up manually. Is this the expected behavior from an F5 load balancer? Or does it depend on the version of the device in question or the software?
According to the manager that runs this system, they are telling me this is how it is and that the load balancer isn't "smart" enough to know unless we manually force it offline. Does this pass the sniff test or they being misleading? To me this sounds misleading at best. Because what is the point of having an active health check if the load balancer is still going to send requests to servers that fail the health check?
I am just trying to educate myself on this and since this is not my area of expertise. I would think a load balancer should be smart enough OOB to handle functionality like this. But I also want to make sure I am not "inventing" functionality that may not be there or is supported through a different license. Any type of info would be appreciated and thank you in advance for anyone who takes the time to read and reply to this post!
Respectfully,
Brian Jones