Loadbalancing though Proxy

Chris,

 

 

I'm afraid you'll have to provide better description of what you want to achieve. Do you want to loadbalance to different servers based on client's identity? BIG-IP loadbalancing methods actually do not rely on client addresses. Did you mean persistence methods?

I would like distribute traffic between two node servers and keep persistence for user sessions. What I am seeing is that though the proxy the users are all ending up on one node server no matter what load balancing method or persistence method I use.

Chris,

 

 

with the default round-robin loadbalancing method and no persistence, you should see connections being evenly distributed to all active servers regardless of what source addresses the connections are comming from. Are all your servers available? The only reason I can think of why connections would not be loadbalanced is that the proxy aggregates requests from clients onto single serverside connection and you either have only pure L4 virtual servers and/or global variable "web parse" set to "first" on your BIG-IP.

 

 

You cannot use any persistence method relying on client address (e.g. simple persistence) in your case. Assuming your traffic is HTTP, cookie-based persistence methods should work for you, unless:

 

 

* your clients have cookies disabled,

 

* the proxy strips cookies from server responses

 

 

In any case, persistence failures would result in connections being distributed based on the configured loadbalancing method and not in the behavior you describe.

 

 

iRules can be used for selecting pools and/or selecting nodes in a pool based on variety of information in the request. However, iRules can't help you if basic loadbalancing does not work.

 

 

I'm afraid, this thread is getting off-topic for this forum.

All my servers are available, and if I fail them over on the F5 I can see traffic go to either one. I have not tried straight round robin without any persistence yet. That would be a good test.

 

 

I can't use just round robin without persistence because of limitations in the application. It has no way of passing session information between the two web servers. So I need each client to have a persistent session to one web server.

 

 

I agree I can't use client IP addresses, but when I tried cookie it does not seem to work either, so I am looking for some way to do it though irules.

 

 

I can cross post if you think that would help. I just don't have allot of options right now if the default persistence profiles are not working.

Chris,

 

 

cross-posting won't help, your problem is off-topic for any of the DevCentral forums. You should contact F5 support and work with the support engineer to resolve your problem (assuming you have support contract).

 

 

I'd guess that there must be some configuration problem on your BIG-IP because (except for the 2 circumstances I've mentioned in my last post) there is no reason why round-robin loadbalancing method with cookie persistence should not work for you (based on the information you've provided).

 

 

iRules are IMHO not a solution to your problem.