ACE4710 and graceful shutdown

[grichardson661]

Hi,

Is there a way on the Cisco ACE to configure a probe that when it fails it will gracefully close down any active sessions and mark the server as being out of service?

Or is there a method where the web server can instruct the ACE to gracefully mark a server as being out of service and gracefully close down any active sessions?

This is a requirement to help a customer to migrate their application sets without impacting live customer sessions. The alternative is for us to mark the real server as 'inservice standby' but that would require manual intervention, we would prefer the dynamic approach if possible.

Cheers

[Kanwaljeet Singh · Accepted solution]

Hi,

When the probe fails, the ACE will not forward any traffic to those servers because they don't exist anymore, so you cannot have graceful shutdown.

For graceful shutdown you can do "no inservice" as well if you are not using sticky. For sticky connections, you should use "inservice standby". Below is from user guide:

You can also manually take a primary real server out of service gracefully using either the "no inservice" command or the "inservice standby" command. Both commands provide graceful shutdown of a server.

Use the "no inservice" command:

when you do not have stickiness configured and you need to take a server out of service for maintenance or a software upgrade.

The no inservice command instructs the ACE to do the following:

•Tear down existing non-TCP connections to the server
•Allow existing TCP connections to complete
•Disallow any new connections to the server

With sticky configured, use the "inservice standby" command to gracefully take a primary real server out of service. The "inservice standby" command instructs the ACE to do the following:

•Tear down existing non-TCP connections to the server
•Allow current TCP connections to complete
•Allow new sticky connections for existing server connections that match entries in the sticky database
•Load balance all new connections (other than the matching sticky connections mentioned above) to the other servers in the server farm
•Eventually take the server out of service

Let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,

Kanwal