'use node' and persist mutually exclusive?

Long time no post - we have a working implementation of VNC over HTTP through the F5, using iRules to unwrap and wrap the VNC socket data in HTTP. We are actually routing these requests to a group of VMWare servers, but they are not defined in a pool on the F5 because we need the flexibility to stand them up and down on the fly. So what we had been doing is a call to 'use node nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn:xxxx' to define the address and port to route the connection. We also figured we would need a way to persist the connection, so we established a guid we send as part of each client request, and we do a persist uie on that value. As we test we keep getting 'address in use' errors, and I have found posts that seem to indicate when you call 'use node' it ignores any persist calls. Can anyone confirm that or am I reading too much into this?

 

Jim