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Forum Discussion

Eugene_56688's avatar
Eugene_56688
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Oct 14, 2008

SOA and Server Consolidation

Scenario:   Multiple HTTP Services fronted by F5 that load balance to multiple web servers that front multiple j2ee jvms. All shared infrastructure - i.e web-servers have multiple listening ports...
config
design
James_Quinby_46's avatar
James_Quinby_46
Historic F5 Account
Oct 15, 2008
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.