Verifying Cookie Persistence

That makes sense, thanks for the responses.

One thing I noticed was that the IIS iApp uses Cookie persistence with a fallback of Source persistence. When I make a connection through the BIG-IP to the web servers I see the Source persistence records in the persistence table even though I'm (presumably) using Cookie persistence. When I ran some tests I noticed that

1. Client connects to the big-ip
2. The BIG-IP makes a load balancing decision and then creates a persistence record based on the source IP address (after it applies the mask)
3. The BIG-IP make the HTTP request to the server and the server sends back the HTTP response
4. The BIG-IP inserts the persistence cookie into the server response and then sends it to the client

5. The client makes a subsequent request to the BIG-IP.

    

   5a. If the client request contains the persistence cookie, the BIG-IP decodes it and then sends the request to the correct webserver.

    

   5b. If the client request does not contain a persistence cookie, the BIG-IP looks for a matching entry in the persistence table. If there is a matching entry the BIG-IP sends the request to correct webserver.

    

   5c. If the client request does not contain a persistence cookie and there is no matching entry in the persistence table, the BIG-IP makes a load-balancing decision.

    

How do you know for sure that the BIG-IP is using Cookie persistence and not Source persistence? Is there something in the persistence table you can look for that shows "active" connections. If I run the 'show ltm persistence persist-records all-properties' command from TMSH I don't see what I'm looking for but maybe I'm missing something.

I have verified that even after the Source persistence record times out, my session still persists to the same webserver. Is this is the best way to verify cookie persistence?