I never fully got this working for what I needed... however, I did finally figure out a solution that works for us.(really has nothing to do with the original question!)
Long story short, what I needed was to adjust the idle timeout so it would create a "new" connection each time a call comes in so they are load balanced rather than getting stuck to one server for all calls. So this whole time I should not even been looking for a persistence solution, no clue how it was working with the ACE before. Either way, works like a champ.