persist none for all pool connections when only one member is active (tcp only)

If your goal is to send about half the connections to the second server after it comes up, then I would seriously consider using the Election Hash iRule (http://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/default.aspx/iRules/ElectionHashLoadBalancingAndPersistence.html) for all of your persistence for this appliction.

 

 

Since you're not on 10.x, you'll need the iRule, and since you're not even on 9.4, you'll need to hardcode the list of pool members instead of using "active_members -list". Also, since you don't have any L7 data to key off of, you'll need to be using the client IP instead of the HTTP uri. But overall this would probably the easiest solution to code.

 

 

I would echo the above sentiment that setting up SSL offloading onto the BIG-IP would be something to push for trying soon. It is not that difficult to setup by itself, though your application could very well introduce some complexities as it may have some assumptions about getting data over HTTPS. It very likely will help reduce load on your existing servers, as they would no longer have any SSL processing to contend with.