RPC load balancing among multiple tiers using iRules, pools and forwarding

Yes. I hate to say it, but our docs are very lacking... Depending on which version of the doc you have, it may be way off. We recently made a pass through and tried to correct all the examples, so either you don't have that updated copy or we missed that.

There are actually two methods that operate similarly in this regard. The first and more preferred method is that you can select a specific pool member from within a pool. You do this with some extra arguments to the pool command:

pool  member  

or

pool  member :

The <> denote arguments you need to supply.

The advantage to using a pool member is that the member status is checked and adhered to and statistics are updated appropriately. So, if the member is down or the member does not exist, the LB_FAILED event will be fired to allow some corrective action.

The other method, which you found, is directly selecting a node. This basically is similar to rewriting the destination and then forwarding. There are no checks or statistics done on this method, so if the node doesn't exist or is down, the connection will just eventually time out.

The syntax for the node method is:

node  

or

node :

(Since you edited out your question about switch -glob, I'm assuming you figured it out).