Performance based "Priority groups"

Hi,

Thanks a lot for suggestions. Probably I was to quick with this post and after some re-thinking probably functionality is more GTM area. This was all about how to handle spikes in traffic without investing in more servers in DC, so being able to offload this spikes to VE instances in the cloud created and destroyed on demand (to save costs). You stated "You know, usually, people do not have spare servers doing nothing and waiting for other servers to being overloaded". For me Priority Group Activation (PGA) is exactly about having servers doing nothing - just in case main servers experience problems - at least I understand it like that. Sure, those idle servers in one pool could be working servers in another but it seems to be risky setup in case all the power is needed for pool where PGA was configured. However I was thinking about some sort of solution using PGA. Those are theoretical ideas based on my (yet) limited knowledge about LTM: 1. First priority with two members 2. Lower priority with one member 3. Lowest with one member 4. PGA set to lower than 2 5. All members with set Connection limit to let's say 200

My idea is that this setup should work like that: 1. When one of the highest priority members exceed connection limit status is changed to Unavailable. I assume that this status is triggering PGA like down or forced offline - Am I right? 2. Then PGA should activate member from lower priority - so again there are 2 members available 3. If either second member from highest priority or one from lower priority exceeded connection limit then member with lowest priority is activated - again two members up 4. Then when higher priority members will be back under connection limit lower priority members are no more used. In the end again only members from highest priority are serving requests.

That way (of course only if unavailable status triggers PGA) lower priority members are added not because higher priority are down but because of overload. So instead of HA kind of operation PGA is more in performance mode. Or of course all above is just complete nonsense...

Piotr