I was able to test this further on a development vip/pools using examples provided by nitass and persistence does not seem to be an issue. It is working as it is suppose to. I didn't try bhattman's suggestion as it seemed to be working okay with persist none on the test VIP. I'll have to test this further on my actual production VIP which happens to be HTTPS which I failed to mention in the intial post.
I also tried Arie's suggestion of doing a HTTP respond and it works well as long as it is an http vip with a http profile attached. I really like the idea of doing it this way, but is it possible if you have an HTTPS VIP passing traffic to HTTPS nodes, F5 NOT terminating the SSL connection?
Thanks for all the help
Brett
Nimbostratus