Session Persistent based on the HTTP Header
Hi DevCentral,
I am relatively new to Load Balancer technology. Our organization has just installed a LTM BIG-IP 2000s Version 11.6 as our Internal Servers node Load Balancer. The traffic flow is described as follows:
The actual Load Balancer clients are Mobile Apple IOS Device (e.g. Iphone, Ipad ..) and will somehow connect to an "Application Server" running a web services. All IOS clients initiate sessions connection to this "Application Server" first, then the "Application Server" will then initiate one Pool session to the Load Balancer LTM BIP-IP 2000s on behalf of the multiple IOS clients. It is a mandatory requirement to have "Session Persistent" on an application perspective based on each individual clients. Due to the above traffic flow behaviour, adopting both "Cookies" persistent and "Source Address" persistent methodology on the LTM persistent profile are not appropriate as the BIG-IP LTM is facing all traffic coming from this one and only "Application Server". Our application service provider proposed to inject an Parameter on the HTTP header e.g. "iSession" with a running unique session number for each IOS clients connection which initiate the traffic from the "Application Server" to the BIG-IP LTM in order to address the issue.
Our question is whether BIG-IP LTM can able to retrieve this session number from the HTTP Header provider by the application and based on this retrieved session number forward all subsequent requests with the same session to the same Node member. I understand this can only be done by using iRule as it seems all the "persistent profile" mechanism (i.e. cookies, source address, destination address, hash ..) can not achieve our requirement.
Highly appreciate your technical advice in advance and provide some guideline or implementation steps which will really help our project implementation.
Thanks & Regards Patrick