Configuring HTTP Load Balancing with Source Address Affinity Persistence

Many computing environments want to use a BIG-IP^® system to intelligently manage their HTTP traffic. You can easily control your HTTP traffic by implementing a BIG-IP system feature known as an HTTP profile. An HTTP profile is a group of settings that affect the behavior of HTTP traffic. An HTTP profile defines the way that you want the BIG-IP system to manage HTTP traffic.

You can use the default HTTP profile, with all of its default values, or you can create a custom HTTP profile. This particular implementation uses the default HTTP profile.

When you configure the BIG-IP system to manage HTTP traffic, you can also implement simple session persistence, also known as source address affinity persistence. Source address affinity persistence directs session requests to the same server based solely on the source IP address of a packet. To implement source address affinity persistence, the BIG-IP system offers a default persistence profile that you can implement. Just as for HTTP, you can use the default profile, or you can create a custom simple persistence profile.

This implementation describes how to set up a basic HTTP load balancing scenario and source address affinity persistence, using the default HTTP and source address affinity persistence profiles.

Because this implementation configures HTTP load balancing and session persistence using the default HTTP and persistence profiles, you do not need to specifically configure these profiles. Instead, you simply configure some settings on the virtual server when you create it.