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DavidB's avatar
DavidB
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Jun 10, 2022

Load Balance WebLogic

Hi, We have been using F5 to load balance Apache and IIS servers for several years. Some of those IIS servers used WebLogic proxies to load balance the application backend on WebLogic. I decided the IIS server added little value in this configuration so I modified the VIP and app on F5 to eliminate IIS. As soon as I implemented this change the application became unstable and sometimes it works but other times it throws an unexpected situation error. We think that when this occurs post requests are changed to get requests and some of the headers and cookies are dropped from the request (based on client side debugging tools). I'm trying to use the deprecated BEA Weblogic template but have also tried removing / tweaking some of the profiles like 1 connect and persistence. For the most part none of these changes have made much of a discernable difference.

application delivery
  • KeesvandenBos's avatar
    KeesvandenBos
    Icon for MVP rankMVP
    Jun 10, 2022

    what type of persistence are you using?
    It should work fine with a basic http load balancer configuration on the BIG-IP. (HTTP profile, cookie persist, snat auto map)

  • DavidB's avatar
    DavidB
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    Jun 10, 2022

    I tried both cookie persistence and disabling persistence. Didn't see where it made any difference. The developers use session persistence within WebLogic but the JSession cookie is one of the things we see getting dropped in some requests.

  • KeesvandenBos's avatar
    KeesvandenBos
    Icon for MVP rankMVP
    Jun 10, 2022

    And Weblogic is sharing the session information amongst it reverse proxy members? Because if so there is no need for the BIG-IP to persist the sessions.
    In the HTTP profile, is rewrite redirects set to matching?

  • DavidB's avatar
    DavidB
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    Jun 10, 2022

    Yes, the session is shared between the two WebLogic servers and we've tested that it is working. I thought the same thing when I disabled the persistenence on the F5. Yes, Redirect Rewrite is set to matching, I think I saw that tip in a really old post on dev central. Another tip I found was setting the WL-Proxy-SSL header (we do SSL offload) like this:

    when HTTP_REQUEST {
    set WLheader "WL-Proxy-SSL"
    set WLheaderVal "true"
    }

    • DavidB's avatar
      DavidB
      Icon for Altostratus rankAltostratus
      Jun 10, 2022

      Yes, I saw that, makes me think I have to go back and confirm I'm not duplicating things unecessarily. But I don't think these settings have had any impact on the undesirable behavior.