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Forum Discussion

Ravi_75530's avatar
Ravi_75530
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Feb 22, 2013

Send same request across multiple pools

Hi,

 

We are using BIGIP for internal load balancing. I was wondering is it possible to configure BIG IP so that same request will be sent to two pools , Let's say Pool A( Live pool) and Pool B( Test Pool). The idea is that Both pools will accept and process the request but only Live Pool(PoolA) response should be sent to original client who requested it and response sent to Test poolB should be written to disk or ignore completely.

 

Any insight on configuration or code samples would be great.

 

 

Thanks,

 

Ravi

 

config
design

6 Replies

  • Kevin_Stewart's avatar
    Kevin_Stewart
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    Feb 22, 2013
    That is a use case for clone pools.

     

     

    http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/13000/300/sol13392.html
  • Ravi_75530's avatar
    Ravi_75530
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Feb 22, 2013
    Does this require any specific BIG IP product to purchase? Is it already enabled in big ip load balancer?
  • Jaz_170005's avatar
    Jaz_170005
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Oct 04, 2018

    Hello, not sure if pool cloning applies to my case. I need to send same request to two different pools...none of them is for monitoring or sniffing traffic. I have a case in which when a client sent a request with certain flag in header--> I have to send it to two different backend pools/applications.

     

    pseudo code: when HTTP_REQUEST { set refresh_cache [HTTP::header Refresh-Cache] if {$refresh_cache eq "true"} { pool pool-1 pool pool-2 } else { pool pool_1 } }

     

    in true case, I see request only goes to pool_1, never reaches pool_2 line which is how the flow works..so is there any way to work around this?

     

    thank you in advance.

     

  • Kevin_Stewart's avatar
    Kevin_Stewart
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    Oct 04, 2018

    Jaz,

     

    It's really not supported to "multi-cast" requests to multiple targets. You're setting up a TCP connection to a backend server (especially for HTTP traffic), so you'd need BIG-IP to establish two separate TCP connections, and then choose which response to send back to the client. An alternative might be to use sideband connections to send the traffic to the servers out-of-band.

     

    Ref: https://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/iRules.SIDEBAND.ashx