WRT to the HSL, I remember an issue a while back where the HSL would (sometimes) only work when there was a floating self-ip on the unit. IIRC it was being sent form a loopback address otherwise.
I think at the time that this behaviour was a bug, and the work-around for it was an iRule that NAT’ed the outbound HSL traffic to the non-floating self-ip. Sorry, I don’t have the iRule around or I’d post it for you to try. But you can confirm by tcpdumping the HSL traffic