IRule causes Virtual Servers to be "up"?

I have found a "trick" to get around this behavior. If you set the pool name as a variable and then call the variable in the pool statement, the iRule doesn't seem to "know" about status anymore. I had a similar problem with this rule:

 
 when HTTP_REQUEST { 
  If the QA cookie exists, go to the QA pool. 
 if { [HTTP::cookie exists "QAPilot"] } { 
 pool WWW-QA 
 } 
 else 
 { 
 pool WWW-GLOB 
 } 
 } 
 when LB_FAILED { 
     LB::reselect pool WWW-GLOB 
 } 
 

However, we needed the VS to fail if WWW-GLOB was down, even if WWW-QA was up (due to OSPF route advertisement). Doing this fixed the problem (since WWW-GLOB was set as the default pool, if the "if" doesn't fire it will fall out to that):

 
 when HTTP_REQUEST { 
  If the QA cookie exists, go to the QA pool. 
 if { [HTTP::cookie exists "QAPilot"] } { 
 set lb_pool "WWW-QA" 
 } 
 else 
 { 
 set lb_pool "WWW-GLOB" 
 } 
 pool $lb_pool 
 } 
  
  If load balancing fails to the QA pool, load balance to the PROD pool. 
 when LB_FAILED { 
     LB::reselect pool WWW-GLOB 
 } 
 

Denny