SOA and Server Consolidation

In a former life we dealt with nearly this exact situation: a tier of mod_perl/mod_rewrite apaches fronting an entire zoo of java app servers (tomcat, WAS, orion, BEA, and so on). The apache stuff was born out of an immense legacy infrastructure that required us to do extensive URL rewriting and proxying.

 

 

We frankly could have done away with much of that with iRules. We also made use of a lot of backside virtual servers - apaches would live in a pool behind one VS, tomcats in another, letting us load balance the web and app tiers separately. SNAT wasn't a huge consideration for our particular environment, though I imagine it could be gotten around via an X-Forwarded-For header now.

 

 

At the time, we were still running on 4.x LTMs, and had just received our first pairs of 9.x machines. The migration to the new gear had just started when I (finally) got out of production operations.