Forum Discussion

Stuart_Page_131's avatar
Stuart_Page_131
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Aug 14, 2013

Question about Pools

I'm at a new job where I have inherited an existing F5 cluster to manage. I've never managed F5's before.   My understanding of pools based on my previous experience with Kemp HLB's is that they'...
  • Mark_Stradling_'s avatar
    Aug 14, 2013

    There are reasons to create pools with the protocol listed. Here is why we use it on our environment.

     

    You can create a pool with a wildcard port of 0. This will cause incoming requests to be routed to the port specified on the client side of the request:

     

    If your pool were defined as pool_member:0

     

    client -----> VIP:443 -----> pool:443

     

    client -----> VIP:80 -----> pool:80

     

    This is all fine and dandy but what if you have multiple pools behind a VIP and not all need SSL all the way through.

     

    client -----> VIP:443 -----> pool:80

     

    In this case you would want to create a pool and define the port so that it does not just route to the port the client requested. (you would probably also want to issue an SSL::disable serverside if it SSL from F5 to the server was enabled)