Hello,
If I understand what you are asking for, you are going to have X amount of servers in a serverfarm and you want a probe 80 ports for each of these to check for the server being up? What you are asking for is not super complicated, but its dangerous in terms of the amount of resources needed to run the probe. If you were to try to open 80 connections at once, you can exhaust the amount of tcp ports available to the system very easily (remember that any given probe can be running while other probes are in process). If you had 10 Rserver per farm, 10 farms, that is 8000 connections and ports in use at one time. Just for these farms, assuming you have no other rservers being probed. You run out of ports at 2000 connections...so that won't work.
If stagger the probes by opening a port one at a time for 1-80, then the amount of time the probe is running becomes very significant and it is very plausible you will start overlapping probes when the server is under heavy load.
From the docs:
"The ACE supports 4096 (ACE module) or 1000 (ACE appliance) unique probe configurations, which includes ICMP, TCP, HTTP, and other predefined health probes. The ACE can execute only up to 200 concurrent script probes at a time. The ACE also allows the opening of 2048 sockets simultaneously.
You can associate the same probe with multiple real servers or server farms. Each time that you use the same probe again, the ACE counts it as another probe instance. You can allocate a maximum of 16 K (ACE module) or 4000 (ACE appliance) probe instances."
Given the 2 scenarios, I would choose the 2nd where you probe one at a time. However, I would not, and do not endorse doing this at all, you are likely going to destroy the probing facility on the ACE when they all start overlapping, or if you have a major network event where the majority of servers have issues.
Regards,
Chris Higgins
