CraigM_17826
Jul 05, 2012Altostratus
VIP behaviour question
Hi everyone. Our company uses PeopleSoft for it's CRM and student managment system. As part of our migration to the cloud they bought in an Oracle specialist in PeopleSoft to redesign the architecture of PeopleSoft so it scales better. One of the changed is that they requested a VIP to load balance Jolt requests. I have no idea what Jolt is, but the way they explained what they needed made it sound realtively simple. What we have is a VIP listeningn on port 9000. This VIP has a pool associated with it. This pool has 4 members listening on port 12300. There is no iRule or http profile assigned to the VIP, SNAT is enabled on it.
What I expected was that any incomming connection to that VIP on port 9000 would be handed off to one of the pool members on port 12300. What appears to be happening is that the initial connection to th VIP on port 9000 happens but then nothing..no traffic flow that we can tell occurs to the pool members. To test this out I set a tail -f on the Jolt logfile and watched it whilst I telneted to the Jolt port on the pool member node. A few keystrokes caused the Jolt listner to close the session with a error
ERROR: Unrecognized message magic 1935960683
If I attempt the same test via the BigIP VIP nothing seems to happens at all, the telnet session seems to accept as many keystrokes as I can enter. It almost seems as if the VIP is buffereing the data or something. So, I decided to create a simple iRUle to log any new connections and what pools and pool members are being used when a connection via the VIP occurs. I repeated the telnet test and saw a log entry upon the initial connection to the BigIP VIP, but nothing else until I closed the telnet session, where upon the log entries displayed the payload (which showed the keys strokes I had entered) and then which pool node it connected to. So I am a little lost, I do not know if the BigIP is at fault or if my tests are invalid. Should the BigIP be passing the data through as it enters the VIP unbuffered?
The cloud BigIP is running BIG-IP 11.1.0 Build 2179.0 Hotfix HF3.
tia
Craig