ACE 4710 - can I dynamically sticky all traffic to 1 server based on URL?

[marksteeves]

Hello all, I'm new to the ACE 4710 and need to know some details about stickyness.

As background, we are a small company with a SaaS product and a pair of webservers.

I have set up the loadbalancing default L7 Load-balancing rule to sticky based on a Cookie based Stickey Group.

That seems to be working and session traffic is sticking to a server during the user's session.

Based on a request from our outsourced developer they would like the Loadbalancer to not only sticky the users sessions, but also sticky a url to a server.

I would like this to happen dynamically as each of our clients will have their own url based on our standard domain like clientname.fixeddomain.com and I don't want to have to come back to the loadbalancer every time we add a client.

As I said, I'm new to these devices but understand the concepts, and am in the position of having to make it work little to no tranining on this hardware and no budget at this point to pay someone else for configuration and setup.

I just need to know at this point if I can stick all requests for a specific URL to a server to avoid caching issue while those sessions are active and have new connections to other client urls balanced among the webservers.

Hopefully this request makes sense.

Thanks,

Mark Steeves.

[Daniel Arrondo Ostiz]

Hi Mark,

For what you are describing, I would suggest you to use the "Host" header for stickiness. Check the link below for more details on how to do it, including an example.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/docs/interfaces_modules/services_modules/ace/vA4_1_0/configuration/slb/guide/sticky.html#wp1060063

I hope this helps. If you have any questions after reading the document, please, let me know.

Regards

Daniel

[marksteeves]

Daniel,

Thanks for the reply, but I cannot reach the URL you included.  It gives me a 403.

Therfore without reading the article, I wanted to ask if the proper setup would be:

1. Default L7 load-balancing action: Primary action: Sticky: Stickey Group using

Type = HTTP Header: Header name = Host

2. Server Farm: Predictor: Least Connections or Round Robin to distribute the load between the 2 web servers.

Using this setting in testing, it looks like all the traffic keeps going to 1 server only.  Granted there is not much traffic t the servers, but I have 2 different url being tested. url1.ourdomain.com & url2.ourdomain.com

If you have another link for the above document, please let me know.

Thanks,

Mark Steeves.

[Troy Baietto]

Hi Mark,

Try removing the "partners" from his url.

-t